Weapons, warlords, and wasteland: Israel's strategy for post-war Gaza

As the Gaza ceasefire loomed, Israel’s Islamic State-linked proxy gang leader, Yasser Abu Shabab, demanded “international protection,” terrified of the prospect of facing justice for systematically looting aid, collaborating with Israel, and killing Palestinians.

The Israeli army had refused to allow these criminal gangs to seek refuge inside Israel itself, and wanted to abandon them, until Netanyahu managed to change the withdrawal lines in the Trump plan and keep over 58% of Gaza in Israel's hands.

Abu Shabab then continued to receive protection, with Israel finding good use for the militia to continue the war by other means.

So far, this has entailed provoking civil conflict, engineering societal collapse, carrying out assassinations, espionage, abductions, and hit-and-run operations on the ground, with Israel bombing from the air.

Israel's unofficial arm in Gaza's genocide

In recent months, Israel has been cultivating more gangs like Rafah’s Abu Shabab around the rest of the Gaza Strip. Husam al-Astal in Khan Younis, Ashraf al-Mansi in Beit Lahia in the North, and Rami Heles in eastern Gaza are now each leading a group funded, armed, sheltered, and protected by Israel in the 58% of Gaza that is fully depopulated and controlled by the Israeli military.

These gangs did not emerge organically. Rather, since May 2024, Israel’s Shin Bet agency and the Israeli army have been identifying and recruiting criminals and fugitives on the run from authorities, especially those who escaped prison after October 7, like Abu Shabab.

Israel artificially grouped together these individuals with a promise of power, money, weapons, vehicles, homes, and the luxuries Gazans are deprived of, like food, water, cigarettes, and phones.

Israel has been using the gangs for four main objectives; to engineer famine in Gaza by unleashing militants to loot 90% of aid convoys under Israeli army protection; to engineer societal collapse, chaos, and the erosion of civic order; to carry out operations on Israel’s behalf; and to operate camps in Rafah that Israel wanted to push Gaza’s entire population into.

Using the gangs would enable Israel to maintain plausible deniability and outsource blame for famine or chaos in Gaza.

This tactic is reminiscent of what Israel did in Lebanon in 1982, when it created the South Lebanon Army (SLA) proxy group and used them to carry out the Sabra and Shatila massacre, when 3,500 Palestinians were slaughtered in two refugee camps. The SLA collapsed as soon as Israel withdrew from South Lebanon, and its members either fled into Israel or were tried for treason.

Israel has also been actively or passively facilitating the flow of firearms, cash, vehicles, and ammunition to large clans in Gaza as a basic divide-and-conquer tactic to consume Palestinians with infighting.

When leaving an area during the war, the Israeli army would often leave behind the firearms of Hamas militants they killed so that the clans would find and collect them. In other instances, Israel would use intermediaries to directly provide weapons or money to those clans.

Despite the clans’ refusal to act as proxies, Israel thought that arming them would create an internal challenge to Hamas.

Israel's strategy is backfiring

In June, the Israeli newspaper Yediot Ahronoth admitted that “Israel’s bet on the Abu Shabab militia is failing”. The size of the gangs is still relatively small, hundreds at best, with an increasing number of gang members recently turning themselves in or acting as double agents inside the militias.

The gangs remain outcasts, rejected by wider society and their own families, who have publicly disavowed them. Their areas of influence are limited to the Israeli military buffer zones, and they have failed to attract a significant number of Gazans to move into their camps, despite the famine and despair Israel has created.

Israel’s use of proxy gangs has backfired in two other crucial ways. Firstly, Hamas’s popularity in Gaza began to recover after the emergence of Abu Shabab and his “popular forces,” given their infamous reputation as drug traffickers with links to IS who were responsible for looting the overwhelming majority of aid.

Fear of criminal gangs and collaborators ruling Gaza created a rallying around the flag effect that played to Hamas' advantage, as it had established an ‘Arrow Unit’ tasked with hunting down gang members.

The security crackdown Hamas launched after the ceasefire aims to boost the group’s popularity further by taking revenge on those gangs and restoring safety and public order.

Secondly, in recent days, Hamas has been confiscating hundreds of firearms, dozens of vehicles, and other ammunition, in addition to substantial amounts of cash that Israel had given to gangs, clans, criminals, and collaborators in Gaza. This led Israel’s Channel 12 to admit that Israel is inadvertently helping Hamas regain strength.

Israel's plan for the gangs

As soon as the ceasefire was announced, Hamas began a campaign to disarm and dismantle different militias around the enclave, but the four main Israeli proxy gangs were all moved behind the yellow line that cuts Gaza in two halves.

Any Palestinian who tries to cross this line is shot by Israel on sight, and Israeli media is openly admitting that the army is “guarding” and protecting these gangs in a depopulated “extermination zone”.

It is not out of loyalty or graciousness that Israel is spending its military resources on protecting a group of outlaws, fugitives, and collaborators. Rather, it is because these gangs are still useful for Israel’s objectives.

Since the ceasefire, Israel has been using its proxy gangs to reach inside areas of Gaza that the army cannot; to collect intelligence, recruit more collaborators, and, more importantly, carry out assassinations and other attacks before fleeing back to the buffer zone. This issue was highlighted with the abduction and murder of prominent Gazan activist Saleh Jafarawi.

Israel has also been using the gangs from the start of the ceasefire to instigate a civil war narrative that paints Palestinians as incapable of governing themselves and in need of external intervention to justify resuming an Israeli bombing campaign under the pretext of “protecting Gazans from Hamas”.

Israel may also use its proxy gangs for a false flag operation to justify resuming the genocide in full force. Former Mossad officer, Avner Avraham, said recently that Israel’s “creative idea” to collapse the ceasefire could be “our people send missiles from inside [Gaza] and they we say ‘oh, there’s a missile from Gaza’ so now we can [retaliate].” He added, “We are going to erase Gaza”.

Finally, Israel is now using the proxy gangs to circumvent pressure to rebuild Gaza. The Israeli government managed to convince the Trump administration that reconstruction in the enclave should only be carried out in the 58% controlled by Israel.

But those areas are fully depopulated except for the few hundred gang members and their families. No Palestinians are allowed to enter those areas, so who is this selective and superficial reconstruction going to be for?

This means Israel intends to build a Potemkin Village - an external façade to make the world believe the situation is better than it actually is, then use it as a pretext to justify why two million people should remain caged in an uninhabitable zone and regularly bombed by the air and attacked on the ground by gangs.

Myanmar pulled a similar trick in 2023 to whitewash its Rohingya genocide. The Burmese government built two “model villages” for 314 Rohingya families with tiny dwellings that have no bathrooms, kitchens, or food arrangements, merely as a fig leaf to cover up its atrocities. Meanwhile, over a million Rohingyas are still refugees stuck in Bangladesh and neighbouring countries.

Israel will promote the Abu Shabab village as proof that it is “helping Gazans” and not preventing reconstruction, while outsourcing the blame for the unliveable conditions it imposes on two million Palestinians caged in the other flattened half of Gaza.

Israel is not just waging war, it is staging a performance for the world, where collaborators pose as community leaders and ghost towns are dressed up as “reconstruction”.

Behind the razor-wire and propaganda lies a sinister innovation in colonial violence: rule by proxy, ruin by design. The gangs may wear keffiyehs and carry Palestinian IDs, but they operate as Israel’s unofficial arm, tasked not with governing, but with making governance and societal cohesion impossible.

If the world buys the illusion, it will not just betray Gaza; it will reward a blueprint for genocide that hides its hand behind collaborators and concrete façades.

Muhammad Shehada is a Palestinian writer and analyst from Gaza and the EU Affairs Manager at Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor.

Follow him on Twitter: @muhammadshehad2