Yasser Abu Shabab escaped prison and has since emerged as an Israeli-backed militia leader in southern Gaza.
In June, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu admitted to arming and supporting the Popular Forces militia in Gaza to oppose Hamas.
“What’s wrong with this?” he said in a short video he tweeted. “It only saves the lives of Israeli soldiers.”
He did not clarify what the Popular Forces would do exactly, but experts believe Israel is backing the militia and its leader, Yasser Abu Shabab, to put a Palestinian face on the ethnic cleansing of Gaza.
The 31-year-old Abu Shabab, a previously unknown member of Gaza’s Tarabin Bedouin tribe, escaped prison around October 7, having been imprisoned since 2015 for drug-related charges.
Drugs are reportedly smuggled into Gaza through Egypt’s Sinai and, according to analysts, are run by ISIL-affiliated groups. This has led to a widespread belief that Abu Shabab has ISIL (ISIS) links.
But Abu Shabab’s alleged affiliation with ISIL has not been an issue for Israel; analysts say it is using him to advance its ethnic cleansing plans in Gaza.
Despite this, he has a sophisticated and multilingual social media presence, and he recently penned an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal claiming that Palestinians in Gaza were done with Hamas.
Analysts believe his refined media presence is likely honed outside Gaza.
“He’s not been in touch with society for the last decade,” Shehada said. “He’s a nobody. He’s basically a front guy.”
His own tribe, the Tarabin, does not approve of his role in Gaza today, making a rare public statement disavowing him for allegedly collaborating with Israel.
Abu Shabab emerges
Abu Shabab began to rise to prominence in late May 2024 after Israel invaded Rafah, in southern Gaza.
Instead, international aid workers say it was Abu Shabab who was systematically looting the aid.
An internal UN memo obtained by the Washington Post specifically named Abu Shabab “the main and most influential stakeholder behind systematic and massive looting” in Gaza.
During the brief ceasefire that Israel unilaterally broke in March, Abu Shabab disappeared, only to reappear in mid-May when Israel, under immense international pressure, started to allow a trickle of aid back into Gaza.
“Literally on that day, he emerges again out of nowhere,” Shehada said.
“He’s been the face of Israel’s hunger campaign,” Shehada said, “while giving Israel full deniability of it and outsourcing the thing.”
Beyond the stealing of aid meant for starving Palestinians, analysts said Abu Shabab and his militia are contributing to a wider Israeli plan to ethnically cleanse Gaza, which has been intensifying this year.
“Israel is in the process of trying to build up the militias associated with Abu Shabab in hopes that they can expand the concentration camp zones over which those militias can operate/control so that Israel can reduce the burden of occupation while facilitating the ethnic cleansing,” Tariq Kenney Shawa, the US policy fellow at Al-Shabaka, a Palestinian policy network, told media.
In early July, Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz announced a plan to push 600,000 Palestinians into tent cities in southern Gaza and called it “voluntary migration”. When Katz revealed the plan, it was widely panned by the Israeli media and humanitarians.
Abu Shabab’s militia has been building what analysts are calling concentration camps in southern Gaza, in an effort to drive more than half a million Palestinians there before being displaced to third countries.
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