Footage has emerged showing the public executions of three men accused of being Israeli collaborators in Gaza City.
BBC Verify has verified that the location of the executions was a street outside Shifa hospital in the centre of the city, which is the focus of a major Israeli ground offensive.
Videos circulating on Sunday evening showed at least five armed and masked men, three blindfolded Palestinian men kneeling on the ground and a large crowd.
One of the armed men is heard saying: “The death sentence has been decided for all collaborators”.
There are cheers before the three men are pushed to the ground and shot several times in the back of the head. The crowd then praises Hamas’s armed wing, the Qassam Brigades.
A Palestinian security official from the Hamas-run Gaza government told Reuters that the executions were carried out by the “Joint Operations Room of the Palestinian resistance”.
This is a rare instance in which a public execution in Gaza has been captured on video. There have been previous reports of Hamas using violence on those who dissent. In May, Hamas-led groups reportedly executed four Palestinians for looting aid trucks.
In Sunday’s footage, one armed man singles out Yasser Abu Shabab as a “major collaborator” who they seek to kill.
Abu Shabab is major figurehead of a clan which has reportedly been armed by the Israeli government. It has been operating in Rafah, in an area under Israeli military control. The group has presented itself as an opposition force to Hamas.
In July Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu confirmed that Israel was arming clans in Gaza that he said were opposed to Hamas. However, Yasser Abu Shabab posted online to “categorically reject” that Israel had supplied his group’s weapons.
That same month, a senior officer in Hamas’s security forces told the BBC that the Palestinian armed group had lost much of its control over the Gaza Strip and that armed clans were filling the void.
Abu Shabab’s armed group has been advertising for recruits on social media, Reuters reported. The news agency quoted residents and sources close to Hamas as saying that other groups opposed to Hamas had also emerged in parts of northern Gaza and near Khan Younis in southern Gaza.
Israeli troops meanwhile have continued to operate in Gaza City. The Israeli military said troops had “dismantled military infrastructure used by Hamas” and killed a Hamas cell that had attacked Israeli soldiers, wounding an officer.
It has said its objectives are to free the hostages still held by Hamas and defeat up to 3,000 fighters in what it has described as the group’s “main stronghold”.
However, the offensive on Gaza’s biggest urban area, where one million people were living and a famine was confirmed last month, has drawn widespread international condemnation.
Last week a spokeswoman for the UN’s humanitarian office said she had seen a constant stream of Palestinians heading south during a recent visit to the city, but that hundreds of thousands remained in the city. She described the situation in the city as “cataclysmic”.
The Israeli military launched a campaign in Gaza in response to the Hamas-led attack on southern Israel on 7 October 2023, in which about 1,200 people were killed and 251 others were taken hostage.
At least 65,344 people have been killed in Israeli attacks in Gaza since then, according to the territory’s Hamas-run health ministry.
