Hamas tortures Gaza civilians while world distracted

Telegraph

21 hours ago

The face of the young man staring into the camera as the crowd streams around him is strong and defiant.
In his hands, the 26-year-old holds a banner bearing an incendiary message: ' Hamas does not represent us.'
An accompanying video shows him spurring on others, openly fanning the flames of dissent while many of the people around him nervously avert their faces to avoid being identified on camera.
That man is Ahmed al-Masri, one of the key organisers in northern Gaza of the protests that rocked the enclave in April and May.
This week, pictures emerged of the same man on a stretcher, a frightened and helpless look in his eyes, his legs a bloodied mess.
According to multiple sources who spoke to The Telegraph, Mr Al-Masri was abducted by Hamas gunmen in Beit Lahia, near the northern border with Israel, whereupon he was brutally tortured.
His feet were deliberately broken with large stones and iron crowbars; he was also shot in the legs.
The atrocity is part of an escalating wave of bloodshed unleashed by Hamas against the ordinary Gazans it purports to represent.
As the terror group faces an unprecedented squeeze on its military and economic strength by Israel's grinding campaign, it is turning to ever crueller methods to keep control of an increasingly desperate population.
Khaled Abu Toameh, a lecturer and expert on Palestinian affairs, said: 'After the protests of the last few months, they began executing and arresting people in order to intimidate the population and to terrorise.
'I think it's working. After a certain point, the protests disappeared.'
In recent weeks, reports have multiplied of people being dragged out of aid lines, tortured in basements, or simply executed in broad daylight.
One video, published gleefully by Hamas-affiliated social media accounts, showed masked figures using a long metal pole to smash a blindfolded man's kneecaps.
His agonised screams and pleas for mercy are too visceral to properly describe.
Much of this violence is done in the name of the so-called Sahm unit – meaning arrow in Arabic.
Those who make it to hospital are sometimes hunted down and finished off in the wards.
In Mr Al-Masri's case, the violence came in several waves, and was centred around a major medical facility.
People with knowledge of the situation, too frightened of reprisals to be named, said the young activist was kidnapped and taken to the Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City, where he was interrogated and warned not to speak to the media.
One said: 'They shot two people in front of him, then they shot him in the feet.
'They broke his feet with large stones and crowbars and threw him out in the sun for an hour.
'Then they brought an ambulance and took him to the hospital where they beat him on his feet inside the ambulance.'
In another notorious incident earlier this month, Hamas gunmen allegedly taunted victims they had shot up earlier by preventing them entering a hospital, leaving them to writhe around outside.
Mr Al-Masri, who runs a pharmacy business, was first taken to the main Al-Shifa hospital, but he has now been moved elsewhere for his safety, according to friends.
They are now appealing to anyone who will help to get him out of Gaza, both to escape Hamas and to get proper treatment for his injuries.
'He's in an extremely bad way,' one person said. 'We are trying to do our best for him, but people are terrified of speaking out in case they're next.'
Some activists believe Hamas has taken advantage of Israel's conflict with Iran to step up its campaign of intimidation while the eyes of the world are elsewhere.
They are doing their best to flood the parts of social media seen by the West with graphic videos and photographs put out by Hamas in the Arabic corners of the internet that are mainly watched by people in Gaza.
One, Howidy Hamza, described the victims as being 'killed twice'.
First, by Hamas; second 'by a movement that refuses to see them', the pro-Palestine movement in the West, many of whose supporters, including those on university campuses, hold Hamas up as a legitimate organ of resistance.
He made the point this week above a video of a blindfolded man being interrogated for alleged 'collaboration with the Palestinian Authority', the body that governs, under ultimate Israeli control, the West Bank.
With that accusation amounting to a capital crime under Hamas's rule, it is likely the man was executed.
The Telegraph has learnt details of a further killing of a protest organiser, Mohammed Abu Saeed, who led the movement in Khan Younis.
Witnesses have said he was shot so many times in the feet that one had to be amputated.
At his funeral, Hamas gunmen allegedly opened fire on the procession, killing members of his family.
Alongside the physical violence, these smear campaigns against those who demonstrate dissent are a key Hamas tactic.
In Gaza, accusing someone of collaborating with Israel is the worst slander.
'It goes back to the time of the British mandate,' said Mr Toameh. 'If you want to smear someone you accuse them of collaborating with the occupier. Thousands have died in the West Bank because of this since 1967.'
One activist, who declined to be named, said the terror group had begun trying to entrap people into saying incriminating things by approaching them with fake social media accounts.
Although the protests of April and May died out, Hamas faces an enormous challenge to its authority with the introduction of the new aid distribution system.
Under a plan agreed by Israel and the US – and opposed by nearly everyone else – a US firm, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), distributes aid from a small number of specially created hubs.
It has been condemned as inhumane, and there are almost daily mass shootings, with Israeli troops, who provide an outer ring of security for the US contractors, implicated by eyewitnesses.
Despite the system's many cruelties, it does appear to have worried Hamas, which previously intercepted and then sold back huge amounts of aid that arrived into communities by truck.
'Hit with sticks, iron pipes and stones'
On June 11, gunmen ambushed a bus carrying Palestinian workers for one of the GHF hubs in an area of Al-Mawasi, near Khan Younis, killing eight.
One of the dead was Osama Sa'adu Al-Masahal.
His sister, Heba Almisshal, said that after the shooting, 'my brother and his companions were transported to Nasser hospital, but they were not left in peace'.
She added: 'The gunmen caught them, threw them at the hospital gate, prevented doctors and nurses from providing any help, and forced people to hit them with sticks, iron pipes and stones.'
It was later suggested that Hamas had targeted the workers because it believed them to be associated with a militia tied to Yasser Abu Shabab, the leader of a clan in the south of the strip that is being armed by Israel.
As starvation increases, emboldening desperate Gazans into questioning their rulers of the past two decades, the power of these armed families, which long pre-date the terror group, has grown.
On Thursday, pictures emerged of the aftermath of a firefight in the Nasser hospital after Hamas gunmen had taken cover from furious family members of a young man they had allegedly just killed.
Three of their vehicles were burned.
Despite all this, Hamas remains by far the most powerful Palestinian group in Gaza.
As the last few weeks have shown, suggestions by hard-line Israeli ministers that ordinary Gazans could simply 'throw off' the terror group – the implication being that maybe they did not really want to – proved to be cruelly wide of the mark.
It means the population, more than a hundred of whom died in less than 24 hours on Thursday, continues to be caught between the Israeli war machine and jihadists who use their suffering to justify its case in front of the world.