For six years, the killing of Amr Abu Setta, one of the leaders of a Palestinian resistance group in southern Gaza,
remained a mystery. While there were many tales about how he died,
there was consensus that Israeli intelligence was in one way or another
behind his murder. The Israeli army accused him of being responsible for
the deaths of a large number of occupation soldiers. A few months ago,
the mystery was solved.
It
became apparent that the person who placed the explosives under Abu
Setta's car is Mohamed Ibrahim Ahmed Ismail, a Palestinian working for
Israeli intelligence. Ismail detonated the explosives via remote control
upon orders from Israeli intelligence, killing Abu Setta and one of his
aides. Ismail used his connections with some people in Abu Setta's
circle to place the explosives that ended the life of this highly
respected leader in Gaza. Ismail confessed to his involvement and received a death sentence from the military court in Gaza. He was executed 15 April.
This
was not the only crime to which Ismail confessed. Other than
collaborating with occupation forces, he admitted causing the death of a
number of wanted Palestinian resistance activists by placing stickers
on their vehicles to enable unmanned Israeli planes to target them.
According to a statement of the Ministry of Interior in Gaza,
Ismail confessed to plotting the assassination of Hossam Hamdan, the
son of prominent Hamas leader Ahmed Hamdan. Israeli intelligence killed
the younger Hamdan in another operation. The collaborator also revealed
that he assisted the Israeli army by going to Rafah, deep in southern Gaza, to defuse explosives placed by the resistance targeting Israeli forces that had penetrated the area.
This was the first time that an execution was carried out since Hamas began governing Gaza
single-handedly in the summer of 2007. Another man, Salama Mohamed Abu
Freh, who is a resident of Gabalya, was also executed after confessing
to collaborating with the Israeli occupation forces. Abu Freh admitted
that upon orders from Israeli intelligence he specialised in monitoring
the border between Gaza and Israel and reported anyone who approached it.
Since
2002, Abu Freh began participating in military invasions after
receiving military training in the occupied territories in 1984. Abu
Freh further revealed that during the last war on Gaza,
he participated in the Israeli invasion of Gabal Kashef, the Ottoman
region and the recent invasion of eastern Gabalya, where a large number
of civilians were killed. In return, Abu Freh received sums of money.
A senior Palestinian security source told Al-Ahram Weekly that the confessions of these two agents revealed the type of missions that are assigned to Israeli agents in Gaza.
"Without these agents, occupation forces would not be able to succeed,"
he asserted. "Accordingly, espionage must be stamped out. We have
decided to invest a lot of energy to curtail the damage done by
collaborators with Israel." The source revealed that Israel
manipulates economic and social conditions, as well as its control of
the borders, to convince as many young Palestinians as possible to
conspire with it.
Khalil
Al-Hayya, a prominent Hamas figure, defended the death sentences
asserting that the incumbent government will continue executing Israeli
agents as part of its legal mandate. "Society has a right to defend
itself against this danger," Al-Hayya argued. "We cannot ignore the
issue of agents any longer; they were given an opportunity to mend their
ways and rejoin their people. We cannot tolerate this issue anymore."
He suggested that the education system should play a pivotal role in
shielding young Palestinians from the manipulations of Israeli
intelligence.
But
lawyer Mustafa Ibrahim criticised the executions as beyond the basic
mandate of Palestinian law, explaining that the law states that no
execution can be carried out without the approval of the Palestinian
president, and this did not happen. Ibrahim believes that the executions
could negatively influence national reconciliation because Palestinian
President Mahmoud Abbas will consider them a signal that Hamas is not
serious about ending inter-factional divisions.
Nonetheless,
like others who are critical of the execution orders, Ibrahim
understands the gravity of the issue of Israeli agents and the need to
neutralise them. In fact, harsh measures against collaborators are
popular among Palestinians, to the extent that 94 per cent living in Gaza
support them. According to the Palestinian Human Rights Centre,
Palestinian courts issued 17 death sentences over the past year -- three
in the West Bank and the rest in Gaza.
Minister of Interior in Gaza Fathi Hammad stated that his cabinet
decided to carry out death sentences against Israeli agents regardless
of opposition from human rights organisations.
But
despite these executions, the Israeli general intelligence agency, the
Shin Bet, continues to develop new methods to recruit Palestinians to
spy on its behalf. One day before the executions took place, the Gaza
Ministry of Interior announced that it uncovered an espionage network
that uses Internet websites. It revealed how Israeli intelligence uses
the needs of the people under siege to recruit agents, and that the
ministry has undertaken a massive awareness campaign to confront this.
Spokesman
for the Gaza Ministry of Interior Ehab Al-Ghassan warned against
"falling into the trap of collaboration through the misuse of social
Internet websites such as Facebook, Twitter and others." Al-Ghassan
stated that Israel
uses these websites to gather information about citizens and blackmails
them into becoming agents. "Unfortunately, some citizens write
everything about themselves on these websites, which include all their
circles of friends and family, giving the occupation a wealth of
information for free," he said.
Al-Ghassan
continued that according to the security apparatus it is apparent from
monitoring the activities of the Shin Bet and the confessions of agents
that Israeli intelligence uses social websites extensively to recruit
agents. Among its methods is "easily accessing these websites and
gathering information, added to what intelligence they already have, and
then blackmailing their targets and attempting to recruit them." The
spokesman added that, "the target feels the Israelis know everything
about him and quickly complies out of fear that they will retaliate
against him with the information they have.
Sometimes,
the Israelis do not directly recruit agents but obtain information
surreptitiously. Some Gazans have reported that Israeli intelligence
have called their landlines and cell phones using overseas numbers,
posing as researchers from international or Palestinian research centres
overseas, polling them about sensitive security issues pertaining to
domestic Palestinian security.
Gamal Sarha, 28, from Al-Nossayrat Refugee Camp in central Gaza told the Weekly that he was surprised to receive a call recently from someone claiming to be from an Arab research centre based in London.
The caller quizzed him about resistance movements and how Palestinians
view them, which made Sarha certain that the caller was connected to the
Israeli intelligence. One question asked was: "What would you do if
resistance fighters stood by your house, would you tell them to move
away or protect them?"
Another young man said that a woman speaking Arabic called claiming to be from an agency in the West Bank,
and wanted him to respond to a questionnaire over the phone. All the
questions revolved around the resistance and how the people respond to
it; he refused to answer the questions after suspecting that the caller
was connected to the Israeli intelligence.
All signs indicate that despite the fierce campaign underway against Israeli collaborators, Israel's
intelligence apparatus is determined to continue developing new methods
and tools to acquire vital information about the Palestinian
resistance. This means that the issue of Israeli agents will remain on
the Palestinian political and social agenda for a long time to come.
