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GAZA CITY — Gunmen fatally shot 18 Palestinians suspected of collaborating with Israel in public on Friday, according to local news agencies and two witnesses, the largest number of such executions reported since the onset of this summer’s battle between Israel and militants in the Gaza Strip.
The victims were not identified but were reported to have been previously arrested or convicted of collaboration, a crime punishable by death under Palestinian law. Gaza’s Interior Ministry, which handles judicial and security matters, declined to address the reported executions. But a statement signed by the so-called resistance was published on many Palestinian websites — including some affiliated with Hamas, the Islamist movement that dominates Gaza — saying a “revolutionary court” had been formed “in agreement with the war’s circumstances.”
Al Majd, a website run by the Internal Security Service of the Hamas government that ran Gaza until June, quoted an unidentified official as saying that “the judiciary procedures and measures were completed against the accused.”
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Journalists, human-rights workers and a witness said that 11 people, including two women, were killed Friday morning in a public park and a bus stop near Al Azhar University in Gaza City, not far from the central prison where they were believed to have been held. Seven others, their hands tied behind their backs, were killed outside Al Omri mosque downtown after noon prayer, another witness said, leaving bloodstains on the ground that bystanders photographed with their mobile phones.
“The spies had their heads covered and were sitting by the wall outside the mosque,” said a witness who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal. “There were about 20 masked gunmen in the area. One of them said loudly that the death sentence is going to be carried out against seven collaborators.”
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“They did not mention their names,” he added. “They shot them after that and then the militants left. People were shouting, ‘God is great.' ”
The executions took place after Israeli airstrikes before dawn Thursday that killed three top commanders of Hamas’s armed wing, and the attempted assassination Tuesday night of its chief, Mohammed Deif, whose fate remains unknown.
The suspected informants who were executed on Friday, and three others that Palestinian news agencies reported suffered the same fate on Thursday, had all apparently been detained for some time. But Israel’s attacks on the Hamas leaders, based on intelligence about their location, most likely led the militants to want to send a harsh public message to potential informants, experts said.
“I think this has provoked, and let’s say triggered, this process,” said Hamdi Shaqqura, deputy director of the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, a Gaza group that has long tracked and condemned such extrajudicial killings. “If you speak to any regular citizen in Gaza, nobody is looking with mercy on these people. Why? Because people are being bombarded. A lot of the blame for bombardment of specific places is being put on collaborators.”
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