The armed Islamist movement Hamas, in power in the Gaza Strip, executed five Palestinians on Sunday morning, two of them for “collaboration” with Israel, a first for about five years. “On Sunday morning, the death penalty sentence was carried out against two convicted of collaborating with the occupation (name given by this movement to Israel, editor’s note) and three others in criminal cases,” Hamas said in a statement, saying that the convicts “had previously obtained their full right to defend themselves” before the local courts.
“Hanged” and “shot”
The interior ministry in the Gaza Strip, a Palestinian territory under Hamas control since 2007, provided details of each of those sentenced, but did not identify the five executed, merely providing their initials, years or location. of birth. The two people executed for “collaboration” with Israel are two men, born in 1968 and 1978 respectively.
The older of the two, who was “hanged”, had been sentenced by the local courts for having provided Israel from 1991 with “information on members of the resistance, their places of residence” and on “the location manufacturing sites and rocket launches,” Hamas said.
The second, who was “shot”, was condemned for having provided Israel from 2001 with “information” which “led to the targeting and martyrdom (death, nldr) of citizens” by the Israeli forces, continued Hamas, without naming the people who would have been killed by the fact of this possible leak of information. The other three people executed had previously been convicted of murder, the Hamas Interior Ministry said in its statement.
Past convictions
In recent years, authorities in Gaza have sentenced several people to death for various crimes or “collaboration” with Israel, but these sentences have not been carried out, with the last known executions dating back to 2017. Three Palestinians – Achraf Abou Leïla, Hisham al-Aloul and Abdallah al-Nachar – had been executed in public after being condemned in a flash trial by the local military courts for having participated in the murder of a Hamas commander, Mazen Faqha, “for account of Israel”.
Hamas had justified these executions, as of the two Palestinians killed Sunday for “collaboration” with Israel, based on the Revolutionary Code of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). Hamas is not, however, a member of the PLO, whose revolutionary code is no longer in conformity on this issue with the Palestinian Basic Law of 2003. And the Palestinian Authority of Mahmoud Abbas had acceded in 2019 to the treaty of UN to abolish capital punishment.
But since fighting in 2007 between the Islamists of Hamas and the secular Fatah of Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian Territories have been divided politically. The Palestinian Authority of Mr. Abbas, which sits in the occupied West Bank, where 2.9 million Palestinians live, has no control over the Gaza Strip, a Palestinian enclave of 2.3 million inhabitants in the hands of Hamas. and under strict Israeli blockade for 15 years.