What I’m wondering is how accurate Hamas’ info is on who is or is not a collaborator. IOW what percentage of the people that they execute as collaborators (and this is far from the first round of executions) are actually collaborators?
I appreciate that there is obviously not going to be any good info on this. But educated guesses with rationales might be helpful.
The only thing I myself have to add is that these executions are thought to be in response to the latest Israeli targeted killings, which happened earlier this week. That seems like a pretty short time to come up with the names of 18 collaborators, which would tend to suggest that they’ve decided to execute people that they are merely suspicious of (which would be why they never dealt with them until now).
If they knew and waited, its most likely they were following the chain upwards. So they get one guy for sure, and then they watch him to see where it leads and so forth.
My thoughts are that the majority are probably innocent, and Hamas simply wants to make an example of collaborators or traitors or what not. These poor suckers might simply have been overheard talking about maybe a change in leadership, after gaza’s urban renewal.
Usually most agents will be cell based, so that if you lose one, you don’t lose the network. Now its kinda hard to figure out exactly who the hammies are pissed at. Collaborators who tell Israeli troops about weapons caches or where someone is hiding, or that Israel maintains a network of informants in Gaza for such eventualities. If its the Former, your simply setting an example of why thats a bad idea, but if its the latter, you want the network and the controller.
You just can’t say its the Israelis either, they might get the product but not control the means. So the spys might be reporting to the Egyptian controller, who passes the intel to Cairo, who then either passes it to the Israelis back channel, or its scraped by Israelis who dont want to worry about formal treaties or anything like that.
Subsitute, Jordanian/Iranian/Syrian/ Free Mars inteligence for Egyptian as needed. I only used the Egyptians as an example.
Do you really think “revolutionary resistance courts” are all that concerned with being accurate or having fair trials? Something tells me this was some sort of kangaroo court put on by militants, not an official legal proceeding by the official Gazan government.
I suspect any sort of resistance to the Hamas regime is labelled as “collaboration”, with the deaths of such “traitors” being timed as a response to successful Israeli attacks.
This serves a dual purpose: it discourages protest or resistance on the one hand, and it makes it look like Hamas is taking swift and effective “action” in response to Israeli attacks on the other.
I’ll hazard a guess that this is being used at least partly to settle old scores and kill rivals within Hamas, i.e. a good ol’ Night of the Long Scimitars.
This happened some during The Troubles as well, and just like in The Troubles I imagine Hamas does get some people that are genuinely collaborators but also get innocents as well. Even a real justice system can punish the innocent, this kind of barbarism that Hamas engages in certainly is much more likely to snare innocents.
I imagine if they know of any serious threats to their regime in the form of Israeli agents in Gaza they probably do not hold off until it’s politically valuable to grab/kill them, but probably do it immediately.
There may or may not actually be any collaborators. However, if they summarily execute a number of people whom they accuse of collaborating, they may ensure the cooperation, (or submission), of a larger group who are not collaborators, but who want to avoid being executed for voicing opinions counter to the Hamas party line.
(The silence of the larger community, of course, then gives outsiders the opportunity to claim that “Palestinians” support Hamas, regardless how many people in Gaza actually do support Hamas.)
This is hardly anything new. Palestinian militants have been killing so-called “collaborators” for decades. In the first Intifada alone they killed around a thousand.
The videos of the “confessions” and executions of them actually used to be popular sellers and may still be.
One of the more poignant moments of Paradise Now, is when Khaled and Said(the two would be martyrs) finds out that they’re more popular that the goodbye videos of martyrs(suicide bombers).
Few if any of them were spies. Most were accused of things like being day laborers in Israel or on a settlement and even those charges were often trumped up.
Some of us outsiders are a little more nuanced than that. We don’t interpret the silence of the terrified as an indication of support. We recognize it for what it is: the silence of those who have been intimidated.
It is a further reason to condemn Hamas, but it isn’t a reason to condemn any Palestinians other than those who willingly support Hamas.
It also gives outsiders the opportunity to deny that “Palestinians” support Hamas, if they are so motivated. So I guess everyone wins.
So far as I can tell, most experts who are actually familiar with the situation believe that Hamas has widespread - though far from universal - support. And the more violent they are the more support they get (at least in the short term), particularly if their violence shows signs of being successful. (It’s for this reason that the Egyptians and PA are thought to be silently wary of too many concessions to Hamas in the interests of a ceasefire.)
Educated guesses with rationales can be enlightening. E.g. there might be people with insider knowledge who are familiar with the process Hamas uses to decide who is a collaborator and have written on the subject, and so on.
I truly doubt there is anyone here with “insider knowledge” of Hamas’ execution process and doubt even more strongly that they’d be out blabbing about it on the internet if they did. You say yourself “I appreciate that there is obviously not going to be any good info on this” but hey, let’s discuss the bad info anyways?
eta: FWIW, a couple of Israeli news outlets have said that the info that led to the Hamas leaders killings came from an intercepted phone call, not collaborators. But I don’t think there was an official pronouncement about those assassinations being specifically why they executed these people.
There are frequently former members of groups who report on goings on, or reports which quote intelligence sources who have good info. Or people who’ve been arrested as collaborators and escaped to write about their experience (or that of their relatives). And so on.
“Good information” means something like “7 of these 18 people are collaborators and the rest are not”, or “62.4% of Hamas collaborator executions are of actual collaborators”. Educated guesses means something like “based on the way Hamas goes about these things in general (or went about it in this case) … it’s likely that most were/weren’t collaborators”.