Hamas security officer says group has lost control over most of Gaza /OR/ Hamas security officer says clans filling void as group loses control of Gaza
In the messages, the officer painted a picture of Hamas's internal disintegration and the near-total collapse of security across Gaza, which the group governed before the conflict."Let's be realistic here - there's barely anything left of the security structure. Most of the leadership, about 95%, are now dead... The active figures have all been killed," he said. "So really, what's stopping Israel from continuing this war?""Logically, it has to continue until the end. All the conditions are aligned: Israel has the upper hand, the world is silent, the Arab regimes are silent, criminal gangs are everywhere, society is collapsing."Last September, Israel's then-defence minister declared that "Hamas as a military formation no longer exists" and that it was engaged in guerrilla warfare.According to the officer, Hamas attempted to regroup during the 57-day ceasefire with Israel earlier this year, reorganizing its political, military, and security councils.But since Israel ended the truce in March, it has targeted Hamas's remaining command structures, leaving the group in disarray."About the security situation, let me be clear: it has completely collapsed. Totally gone. There's no control anywhere," he said."People looted the most powerful Hamas security apparatus (Ansar), the complex which Hamas used to rule Gaza."They looted everything, the offices - mattresses, even zinc panels - and no-one intervened. No police, no security."
The officer said a consequence of the security vacuum was gangs or armed clans were "everywhere"."They could stop you, kill you. No one would intervene. Anyone who tried to act on their own, like organising resistance against thieves, was bombed by Israel within half an hour."So, the security situation is zero. Hamas's control is zero. There's no leadership, no command, no communication. Salaries are delayed, and when they do arrive, they're barely usable. Some die just trying to collect them. It's total collapse."On 26 June, at least 18 people were killed when an Israeli drone strike targeted a plainclothes Hamas police unit attempting to assert control over a market in Deir al-Balah, accusing vendors of price gouging and selling looted aid, witnesses and medics said. The Israeli military said it struck "several armed terrorists" belonging to Hamas's Internal Security Forces.
In this vacuum, six armed groups affiliated with powerful local clans have emerged as serious contenders to fill the void, according to the officer.These groups have access to money, weapons and men, and are active across all of Gaza, but mostly in the south.One of them is led by Yasser Abu Shabab, a figure who has attracted attention from the Palestinian Authority, which is based in the occupied West Bank and is a rival to Hamas, as well as regional players - particularly after Israel confirmed last month that it was supplying him with weapons.The officer confirmed that Hamas had placed a large bounty on Abu Shabab's head, fearing he could become a unifying figure for its many enemies."Hamas would ignore ordinary thieves. People are hungry and [the fighters] don't want to provoke more chaos. But this guy? If the Hamas fighters find him, they might go after him instead of Israeli tanks."Sources in Gaza told the BBC that Abu Shabab was working to co-ordinate with other armed groups to form a joint council aimed at toppling Hamas.
A retired Palestinian security official, who was part of the force that cracked down on Hamas's military wing in 1996 following a wave of bombings in Israel, said Abu Shabab's network was gaining traction."Abu Shabab's group is like an orphaned child who everyone will want to adopt if he succeeds in undermining Hamas rule," said the official, who now lives in Cairo."Publicly, all sides deny links to the armed groups in Gaza. But Abu Shabab has met a senior Palestinian intelligence officer three times and sent messages of assurance to the Egyptians through relatives in Sinai," he claimed.He also said Abu Shabab "maintains good ties with Mohammad Dahlan's camp". Dahlan is a former Gaza security chief who has lived in exile since he fell out with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas 15 years ago.The Hamas security officer warned the group was "willing to do anything" to eliminate Abu Shabab not because of his current military strength, but out of fear he could become a symbol around which all of Hamas's adversaries rally."For 17 years, Hamas made enemies everywhere. If someone like Abu Shabab can rally those forces, that could be the beginning of the end for us."As Gaza is plunged further into lawlessness, with entire neighbourhoods descending into gang rule, Hamas finds itself not just under Israeli fire but increasingly surrounded by rivals from within.
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The question keeps gnawing at me: Could this really be it? Could we be living through a genocide? Outside Israel, millions already know the answer. But many of us here can't – or won't – say it aloud. Perhaps because the truth threatens to unmake everything we believed about who we are, and who we wanted to be. To name it is to admit that the future will require reckoning – not just with our leaders, but with ourselves. But the cost of refusing to see is even higher. For Israelis of my generation, the word 'genocide' was supposed to remain a nightmare from another planet. A word tethered to our grandparents' photographs and the ghosts of European ghettoes, not to our own neighborhoods. We were the ones who asked, from a distance, about others: How could ordinary people go on with their lives while something like this happened? How could they let it happen? What would I have done in their place? In a grotesque twist of history, that question now circles back to us. For nearly two years, we've heard Israeli officials – politicians and generals alike – say out loud what they intend to do: to starve, flatten and erase Gaza. 'We will eliminate them.' 'We will make it uninhabitable.' 'We will cut off food, water, electricity.' These weren't slips of the tongue; they were the plan. And then, our military carried it out. By the textbook definition, this is genocide: the deliberate targeting of a population not for who they are as individuals, but because they belong to a group – an attack designed to destroy the group itself. We told ourselves other stories to survive the horror, stories that kept guilt and grief at bay. We convinced ourselves that every child in Gaza was Hamas, every apartment a terrorist cell. We became, without noticing, those 'ordinary people' who keep living their lives while 'it' is happening. I can still recall the first time reality cracked open for me. Two months into what I was still calling a 'war', three of my B'Tselem colleagues – Palestinian human rights workers we'd worked alongside for years – were trapped in Gaza with their families. They told me about relatives buried under rubble, about not being able to shield their children, about the paralyzing fear. In the frantic efforts to extract them from Gaza, I learned something that has seared itself into my mind: at that moment, a living Palestinian in Gaza could be 'ransomed' for roughly 20,000 shekels – the cost, at the time, of leaving. Children cost less. Life priced in cash, per head. These were not abstract statistics; these were people I knew. And that was when I understood: the rules had changed. Since then, the surreal has become routine. Cities reduced to ash. Entire neighborhoods flattened. Families displaced, then displaced again. Tens of thousands killed. Mass starvation engineered, with aid trucks turned away or bombed. Parents feeding animal fodder to their children, some of whom die waiting for flour. Others are shot – unarmed civilians, gunned down for approaching food convoys. Genocide does not happen without mass participation: a population that supports it, enables it or looks away. That is part of its tragedy. Almost no nation that has committed genocide understood, in real time, what it was doing. The story is always the same: self-defense, inevitability, the targets brought it on themselves. In Israel, the prevailing narrative insists this all began on 7 October, with Hamas's massacre of civilians in southern Israel. That day was a true horror, a grotesque burst of human cruelty: civilians slaughtered, raped, taken hostage. A concentrated national trauma that summoned, for many Israelis, a profound sense of existential threat. But 7 October, while catalytic, was not enough on its own. Genocide requires conditions – decades of apartheid and occupation, of separation and dehumanization, of policies designed to sever our capacity for empathy. Gaza, sealed off from the world, became the apex of this architecture. Its people became abstractions, perpetual hostages in our imagination, subjects to bomb every few years, to kill by the hundreds or thousands, with no accountability. We knew more than 2 million people were living under siege. We knew about Hamas. We knew about the tunnels. In hindsight, we knew everything. Yet somehow we were incapable of understanding that some of them might find a way to break out. What happened on 7 October was not only a military failure. It was a collapse of our social imagination: the delusion that we could corral all the violence and despair behind a fence and live peacefully on our side. That rupture arrived under the most extreme rightwing government in Israel's history, a coalition whose ministers openly fantasize about Gaza's erasure. And so, in October 2023, every star in our darkest nightmare aligned. This week, B'Tselem released a report, Our Genocide, compiled by Palestinian and Jewish-Israeli researchers together. It is divided into two parts. The first documents how this genocide is being carried out: mass killings, destruction of living conditions, social collapse and engineered starvation, all fueled by incitement from Israeli leaders and amplified through media. The second part of the report traces the path that led here: decades of systemic inequality, military rule and policies of separation that normalized Palestinian disposability. To confront genocide, we must first understand it. And in order to do so, we – Jewish-Israelis and Palestinians – had to look at reality together, through the perspective of the human beings living on this land. Our moral and human obligation is to amplify the voices of the victims. Our political and historical responsibility is also to turn our gaze to the perpetrators, and to testify, in real time, to how a society transforms into one capable of committing genocide. Recognizing this truth is not easy. Even for us, people who have spent years documenting state violence against Palestinians, the mind resists it. It rejects the facts like poison, tries to spit them out. But the poison is here. It floods the bodies of those who live between the river and the sea – Palestinians and Israelis alike – with fear and unfathomable loss. The Israeli state is committing genocide. And once you accept that, the question we have asked ourselves all our lives rematerializes with urgency: What would I have done, back then, on that other planet? Except the answer is not rhetorical. It is now. It is us. And there is only one right answer: We must do everything in our power to stop it. Yuli Novak is the executive director of B'Tselem, the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories
