A friendly reminder of how israelis operate . . . by deception, bribes, blackmail, spies, and every other vile method under the sun.

Basically, israelis are adept at using the rest of the world's conscience against them.

First, they trick them into abandoning their values, then they shame them into participating in treacherous israeli plots against their own people and their own interests.

Works like a charm, every time.

THE [aging] Hamas warrior is nervous as, for the first time in 15 years, he spells out his past as an executioner. His candour, he claims, is sparked by a disturbing trend in Palestinian society that means Hamas's mortal foes - collaborators - pose an even bigger threat than when he called the shots.
Since the darkest days of the al-Aqsa intifada waged by militant Palestinians against Israel, Hamas has been hit harder than any hardline group by traitors. A suicide bombing would almost inevitably lead to an Israeli strike not only on the home of the bomber but also the clandestine cell that dispatched him.

The Israeli reprisals were prompt, usually precise and highly disruptive to the leadership echelons. In Gaza and the West Bank cities of Nablus and Jenin, vengeance traditionally has been just as swift and brutally home-grown.

The Hamas man, who we shall call Ahmad, was one of a small cell of the group's military wing, the Izzedin al-Qassam Brigades, entrusted with tracking down and interrogating Palestinians suspected of collaborating with the enemy.

He says he personally executed seven men, all of whom had colluded and caused the deaths of their compatriots. Most of their paths to treason were driven by two base denominators, sex and money. But others, he claims, were entrapped by the domestic Israeli security service, the Shin Bet, in sting operations that meant they would lose all family honour and possibly risk death if they did not agree to do the enemy's bidding.

He offers the story of a particularly damaging spy.

"He was a merchant selling medical supplies," Ahmad says. "A nurse came to him and bought some merchandise from him. She asked him to drive her home with the supplies and then insisted that he come inside to have a cup of coffee.

"There was food and drink inside the house, and there were other girls there and they seduced him. He ended up having sex with several of them and he was filmed. The Shin Bet sent for him (at that stage Israel maintained an official presence in Gaza). They said you will work with us or we will show these to everybody. He feared for his reputation and accepted their demands."

Ahmad says the Israelis took the man, then about 20, to settlements where they provided him with training and girls. He then received a call from a member of a network. All was in place. "His main mission was to recruit both males and females in the same way that he had been recruited. He recruited some of his closest family this way. He was trusted in his society and he monitored sheiks and key figures in certain organisations (Hamas).

"The Shin Bet told him to throw stones at a Jeep and he was arrested on a bogus charge so that he could spend time in prison and inform about what the militants were thinking and planning."

While in prison, the man was weeded out by members of the Hamas military wing. He confessed to spying and a file on his deeds was passed on to active military wing members on the outside.

When he was released, he was again confronted, this time by Ahmad and another Hamas man. They interrogated him, then passed sentence. He was shot dead within a week, his body dumped on a Gaza street.

Ahmad says another case he dealt with involved a young Palestinian woman who was trying on lingerie in a Gaza shop. "She was filmed and the Israelis said they would pass the photos around her community," he says. "She also agreed to co-operate. But when she was caught, she was not killed."

Across the restive Gaza strip, which is into week three of relative quiet ahead of the formation of a national unity government, another Hamas executioner, who calls himself Abu Khalil, is waiting to meet us in a refugee camp, just north of Gaza city. He recently was freed from jail after serving a seven-year sentence for helping to hunt down Israeli informants.

"I did not tell them exactly what I did or else I would never be out of there," he says. "I am part of a unit called Maijd, which is the security wing of Hamas. Our job was to secretly monitor informants and then take action against them."

Abu Khalil estimates he has executed about 20 informants, most of whom were assigned to infiltrate Hamas. "We prefer to sit off them for a while and try (to) identify their networks. We used to have an underground cell where we would interrogate them day and night. Then we would show his file to a mufti and ask whether there was enough evidence in it for him to be killed.

"If there was, we would throw his body in the street with the garbage."

Even though the Israelis have been out of Gaza for the past 19 months, their influence remains. Many of the networks they put in place before their departure are still providing prescient intelligence and attempting to recruit proxies. Their methods are still the tried and trusted blackmail, sex and money. And their legacy can be seen in Gaza gutters most weeks.

During the past month, according to Abu Khalil, three women have been executed and dumped, accused of spying for Israel and trying to entrap men with sex. No proof has been presented and none will be.

And the reality, with women in particular, can be somewhat blurred. Gaza, like anywhere, has a prostitution industry, albeit small, with many of its practitioners forced into the game by poverty and the death of their husbands. A so-called honour killing is highly unlikely to be prosecuted and, in staunchly Islamic and increasingly conservative Gaza, being a prostitute and being an informant are one and the same. As pivotal to spying and entrapment as prostitutes have been throughout the ages, today's informant can just as easily come from many other walks of life.

Only a few thousand of Gaza's 1.2 million population are candidates for access to Israel these days: truck drivers who ferry goods in and out; labourers who are occasionally allowed in to work in nearby agricultural industries. Drivers are particularly targeted by Israeli spies and several have claimed their Israeli access permits have been revoked after they refused to co-operate.

With less opportunity than before to forge new links, Israel appears to be prospering from the established networks. There were many cases of precision targeted killings during the last six months of last year, particularly of senior members of Islamic Jihad who were dispatching rocket-firing teams to the northern strip.

Even more telling was a pre-dawn strike in July last year in central Gaza that targeted the head of the Hamas military wing, the top person on Israel's most-wanted list for the past five years, Mohammed Deif.

Not only was Deif in the Gaza City grey concrete home that midsummer morning, so was the rest of the military wing ruling council. Deif and all inside escaped the 500kg bomb dropped by an Israeli F-16 plane, but he and several others were seriously injured. Deif's wounds included a broken hip and severe lacerations.

Security sources confirm that mobile phone traces helped Israeli officials zero in on the meeting. However, they were able to pinpoint the house only through a spy in place nearby.

It was this strike more than any that raised the alarm for Hamas.

Israel's departure from Gaza has not lessened the threat against Hamas. The networks the Israelis put in place have run deep through almost three decades of occupation and the collaborators still seem able to recruit fresh blood.

Hamas claims to have adopted a new policy to deal with rats in the ranks. Both Ahmad and Abu Khalil say executions now will be authorised only in exceptional circumstances. Amid the security shambles of Gaza, some basic tenets of order and justice are beginning to take hold and most informants are being handed over to the police or national security forces.

In the central prison last week, prison governor Abdullah Khattab was responsible for 64 alleged informants. Other prisons across the strip hold an estimated 51 more. Omar attributes the growth in informant numbers to a breakdown in family and societal values in Gaza during the period of Israeli occupation.

"All of the men we have here had drug habits and were born in the '60s," he says. "It is a very typical profile and typical of the group who fell victim to the enticements on offer directly and indirectly during the Israeli period here.

"When the Palestinian Authority took charge (in late 2005) the Israelis may have already had 50,000 collaborators recruited.

"After the Israelis left we had the economic siege with very hard conditions. They started paying a little money for little favours. We are ruled by the tribal system, which is very complicated. And when you have instability in a society the atmosphere will always be ripe to recruit more."

Israel has emphatically said its penetration of Gaza and the West Bank hot spots has given it the edge in fighting terror attacks on its soil. Its penetration of Palestinian society has been pervasive, given the enmity that has steadily increased during the past three decades.

"It's not just the informants who have access to key information," Ahmad says. "It's also people like taxi drivers, who are paid to introduce a couple of messages to anyone who gets in his cab. They are not asked to look for people or key events, just to sow the seeds of doubt or divisiveness.

"These people can do just as much damage as the real collaborators."

It's time for the world to wakeup to israeli treachery.

Posted in

• blackmail
• Bribes
• Gaza
• guilt
• Hamas
• informants
• Israel
• shame
• spying
• traitors

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