Eurasia Press & News
A political earthquake hit Israel last week when former Defence Minister Avigdor Liberman revealed that “the Israeli government is giving weapons to a group of criminals and felons, identified with Islamic State [in Gaza], at the direction of the prime minister”.
Netanyahu has since admitted that Israel had been “running” proxy militias in Gaza, but tried to put a positive spin on it, claiming that such a move aims to challenge Hamas’s rule.
But branding these gangs as potential rivals to Hamas masks the very goal of why Israel created them in the first place. Around 300 untrained thieves, drug dealers, criminals, and convicted murderers cannot overpower Hamas’s estimated 30,000 militants.
Their actual role has more to do with advancing Israel’s genocide, starvation, and ethnic cleansing in Gaza while creating plausible deniability.
Furthermore, recent evidence indicates that Israel may have been collaborating with some of these Islamic State-linked elements even before 7 October.
Abu Shabab: A front for an Israeli proxy?
The most prominent gang leader in Gaza is Yasser Abu Shabab. His name first appeared in August 2024 on Hamas-linked social media groups as the figure responsible for looting the vast majority of humanitarian aid and reselling it on the black market for astronomical prices.
A senior security source told The New Arab that Abu Shabab’s gang had been active for months before then.
Local authorities knew Abu Shabab well. He was serving a long sentence in prison for the possession of large quantities of drugs, according to three knowledgeable sources. He was one of many inmates who escaped under the cover of Israel’s war on Gaza in October 2023.
Some other inmates were released on parole when Israel began bombing government facilities. Israeli newspapers like Maariv and Yediot Ahronot confirmed Abu Shabab’s criminal history through people close to him, and even added that he had links to the Islamic State (IS) through smuggling drugs from Sinai into Gaza.
Police in Gaza were perplexed when he emerged as a top gang leader. The security source told The New Arab that Abu Shabab is 35 years old, thin, weak, short (around 150cm in height), uncharismatic, illiterate, has strabismus in one eye, and has never received military training.
To them, he didn’t seem like someone with the leadership skills necessary to form a group of 300 armed militants, steal truckloads of aid, and store it under the radar.
Local authorities quickly decided that Abu Shabab was merely a front for an Israeli astroturfing campaign to maintain its policy of starvation in Gaza after the international community pressured Netanyahu to ease his total siege and allow a trickle of aid into the enclave.
What made this clear, according to them, is how Israeli drones bombed emergency committee volunteers or police officers every time they came close to thwarting a looting attempt by that gang in particular.
By late September 2024, Abu Shabab was talked about in Gaza as an Israeli-backed collaborator, not just a gang leader. That is when Hamas militants attempted to ambush him, firing around 90 bullets at a vehicle they thought belonged to Abu Shabab.
The vehicle, however, was identical to the one used by Islam Hijazi, the program officer of a US charity called Heal Palestine. She was tragically killed in the incident.
Two months later, Abu Shabab received widespread media attention after he burned a fuel truck and completely shut down the route used by aid convoys to retaliate against another Hamas ambush that killed his brother Fathi and 21 other members of his gang.
Soon after, the Washington Post revealed that the UN had named Abu Shabab in an internal memo as the main figure behind aid looting under “passive or active IDF protection”. This left little room for doubt that Abu Shabab’s gang was a tool for Israel to maintain starvation while externalising blame.
Mapping gang leaders: IS, ex-PA intel officers, and murderers
Abu Shabab’s deputy is thought to be Ghassan al-Dahini, 38, reportedly a former lieutenant in the Palestinian Authority (PA). Dahini is the one running the gang’s operations on the ground and actively trying to recruit new members, along with Saddam Abu Zakkar, per local authorities. His Facebook profile displays Israeli hostage emojis.
Another senior Palestinian security source told The New Arab that Dahini was a member of the “Army of Islam”, the extremist group responsible for kidnapping journalist Alan Johnston in 2007.
The group pledged allegiance to IS in 2015. Ghassan’s brother, Mohammed, died in prison after he was detained on drug-related offences, and Ghassan himself was imprisoned twice in March 2020 and November 2022, per the source. He added that “the Army of Islam relied on Dahini for the Sinai smuggling routes”.
On Sunday, Dahini posted a video of himself in military gear in Eastern Rafah close to Israel’s perimeter fence. He was standing next to a white pickup truck with a UAE license plate from Sharjah and firing a brand-new Serbian Zastava rifle.
Another prominent gang leader in Rafah is Shadi Soufi, a convicted murderer who was awaiting a death sentence before 7 October for killing a Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) leader. Like Yasser, he also escaped prison during the war and was named by humanitarian organisations as responsible for looting aid under Israeli protection in Rafah.
Soufi, al-Dahini, and Abu Shabab are from the same Bedouin Tarabin clan that stretches across Rafah, Israel’s Negev desert, Egypt’s Sinai, and Jordan. Abu Shabab’s family recently disowned him for collaborating with Israel and said they will go after him to hold him accountable.
Another prominent leader of the Abu Shabab gang is Essam Soliman Nabahin, 35, a convicted murderer and IS member. He was implicated in a series of bombings against Hamas in 2015 by extremist Salafist groups and escaped to Sinai to formally join IS’s ranks. He caught the attention of Egyptian media in 2017 after taking part in attacks against the Egyptian army.
Nabahin’s name resurfaced in June 2023 when the police raided a house in central Gaza where he was hiding. He killed a police officer and was convicted in a military court before his escape in the early days of the war.
Israel says Nabahin was previously “recorded launching rockets into Israel without coordination with Hamas”.
Local authorities in Gaza have long suspected that IS-linked individuals like Nabahin were being pushed by Israel’s Shin Bet to fire one or two primitive projectiles sporadically to give Israel a pretext to strike Gaza and bomb specific targets. Hence, the police detained those militants repeatedly.
A senior Palestinian security source told The New Arab that authorities in Gaza caught a collaborator in 2018 who directed such occasional rocket attacks to give Israel cover for military action in Gaza.
Other members of the gang include multiple known drug dealers and convicted murderers.
How is Israel helping them?
Israel’s government has admitted it provided weapons to these gangs, mostly rifles and other light weaponry, in addition to money and equipment. Footage posted by Abu Shabab’s gang showed them driving in white pickup trucks with machineguns on top that looked virtually identical to those of Hamas.
In addition, Israel provides these gangs with safe refuge in areas fully depopulated by the Israeli military, like Rafah, and declared “extermination zones”, where any Palestinian entering would be killed on the spot. They are also provided with logistical support, protection, and even access to Israeli territory.
A Palestinian journalist documented one case of a gang member crossing into Israel, which could explain how those gangs disappeared completely during the ceasefire last January.
On the ground, the Abu Shabab gang has established warehouses operated with forklifts where they store looted aid. They have also established a military complex, according to the UN, which said the Israeli army would force aid convoys to drive through the areas where the gangs had positioned their militants and put up checkpoints to loot trucks.
And where the Israeli military goes, so do the gangs. After Israel issued forcible expulsion orders for Khan Younis and raided the European hospital and its surrounding area, Abu Shabab moved into the ‘Jarghoun’ villa in that very same area, per security sources.
On Tuesday, Israeli news channel i24 reported that Israel had launched airstrikes to protect the gang after it was attacked by Hamas militants in southern Gaza. The strikes killed four Hamas members.
What role do the gangs play on Israel’s behalf?
The Israeli-backed gangs in Gaza have become an unofficial arm of the Israeli military. For instance, whenever Israel gets pressured to allow food into Gaza, it immediately unleashes the gangs to maintain their use of starvation as a weapon of war, while blaming it on Hamas.
Experts believe Israel is using starvation as a tool for genocide by imposing conditions on a group “calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part”. Prolonged starvation inflicts permanent mental and physical damage, particularly on children.
Israel has also been using these gangs to orchestrate chaos and engineer societal collapse through attacks on markets, shops, private businesses, homes, warehouses, soup kitchens, and other places vital to maintaining the population’s survival.
For instance, in early May 2025, a gang attacked a communal kitchen in Gaza. As soon as volunteers arrived to stop the looting, Israel bombed it and killed six volunteers, which implies it was a coordinated attack.
The Israeli army also sends the gangs on reconnaissance and surveillance missions in dangerous areas. Last month, Hamas released footage of an ambush it carried out against armed men in Rafah whom it thought were undercover Israeli troops. They turned out to be Abu Shabab militants.
Israel also uses the gangs to infiltrate Palestinian society and gather intelligence, as well as to kidnap and interrogate Palestinians by luring them with the promise of food, as documented by Palestinian journalist Younis Tirawi.
Israel is using proxy gangs for the final phase of the war
The most concerning use of these gangs, however, is Israel’s recently announced plan to push Gazans into camps in Rafah on Egypt’s borders to depopulate and destroy “everything that remains” of the rest of the enclave. This is a precursor to Israel’s declared goal of the mass expulsion of Palestinians into Egypt and other countries.
The Abu Shabab gang recently announced establishing an encampment area in eastern Rafah near the Egyptian borders and is using the very aid they have been systematically looting to lure starved Gazans into moving there.
This announcement was preceded by a clear rebranding psyop, where the same gang responsible for looting aid suddenly and shamelessly declared itself as a new “security force” that aims to “protect aid from looting”. They have since emerged in brand-new military and police uniforms in the Israeli-designated buffer zone in Rafah, where no Palestinians are allowed to enter.
Remarkably, Israel has allowed these gang members to wear Palestinian flags and insignia on their uniforms, while at the same time refusing to let the Palestinian Authority’s staff at the Rafah border crossing wear any such symbols.
In other words, Israel is using these gangs as a front. The Israeli army knows that if it orders Gazans to come to camps in eastern Rafah, people will immediately know it’s a trap for mass expulsion. But if a uniformed Palestinian force with good PR on social media makes such a demand, some people might fall for the trap.
Israel has used this same proxy tactic in Lebanon against Palestinians in 1982, where the Israeli military bolstered the South Lebanon Army (SLA) and used it and other militias to commit the Sabra and Shatila massacre, which saw 3,500 Palestinians killed.
Those collaborators collapsed after the Israeli army’s withdrawal from Southern Lebanon, as their leaders surrendered or fled to Israel. The same fate awaits these new Israeli-backed gangs once the Gaza genocide comes to an end.
