Will Hamas Be Held Accountable for War Crimes?

by Khaled Abu Toameh
August 25, 2014 at 5:00 am

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/4646/hamas-war-crimes

What Khaled Mashaal forgot to mention was that Hamas and the Islamic State do have at least one thing in common: they both carry out extrajudicial executions as a means of terrorizing and intimidating those who stand in their way or who dare to challenge their terrorism.
According to Hamas's logic, all members of the Palestinian Authority government are "traitors" who should be dragged to public squares to be shot by firing squads. According to the same logic, Mahmoud Abbas himself should be executed for maintaining security coordination with and talking to Israelis.
As for the two executed women, the sources said that their only fault was that they had been observed asking too many questions about Palestinians who were killed in airstrikes.

Hamas's extrajudicial executions of Palestinians suspected of "collaboration" with Israel are a sign that the Islamist movement is beginning to panic in the wake of Israel's successful targeting of its leaders.

But the public executions by firing squad of more than 26 suspected "collaborators" in the Gaza Strip could also turn many Palestinians against Hamas.

Masked Hamas members (dressed in black) prepare to execute local Palestinians who they claim spied for Israel, Aug. 22, 2014, in Gaza. (Image source: Reuters video screenshot)

Hamas has banned the publication of the names of the executed Palestinians "out of concern for the social fabric" of Palestinian society.

In other words, Hamas is afraid that revealing the identities of the executed "collaborators" would spark outrage in the Gaza Strip and possible calls for revenge, especially from the families of the victims.

Hamas says that the suspected "collaborators" were brought before firing squads after being tried before special "revolutionary tribunals" consisting of security experts and officers.

It says that in time of war, there is no room for holding proper legal procedures and that security circumstances require secret trials followed by swift executions.

Yet some Palestinians in the Gaza Strip argue that in the absence of proper legal procedures, it is impossible to tell whether the convicted Palestinians were guilty or innocent.

Sources in the Gaza Strip revealed that some of the executed men belonged to Abbas's Fatah faction and had no connection with Israel.

The Gaza-based Palestinian Centre for Human Rights was the only group that dared to criticize Hamas for embarking on a spree of public executions in front of passersby, including many children.
A statement released by the human rights group said it was following events "with deep concern news about extrajudicial executions in the Gaza Strip."

Noting that among those executed by Hamas were two Palestinian women, the group called on the Palestinian Authority and Hamas to intervene to "stop these extrajudicial executions, regardless of the reason and motives behind them."

Raji Surani, director of the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, complained that the public extrajudicial executions "cause harm to all Palestinians" and called for "honoring the rule of law and human rights."

However, "honoring the rule of law and human rights" has been a practice alien to Hamas ever since it seized control over the Gaza Strip through a violent and bloody coup against the Palestinian Authority in the summer of 2007.

Back then, Hamas killed dozens (some say hundreds) of Palestinians, including many from the rival Fatah faction headed by Mahmoud Abbas. Fatah members who were not killed during the fighting were later tossed from tall buildings or lynched in public squares.

One prominent Fatah activist, Samih al-Madhoun, was dragged to the street and brutally lynched by Hamas militiamen and supporters.

Over the past few days, Hamas officials have gone out of their way to tell the world that their movement is not like the Islamic State terror organization, which has become notorious for beheading almost everyone it finds standing the way of its creating an Islamic Caliphate.

"We are not a religious, violent group," Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal said in an interview with Yahoo News from his luxurious hotel in Qatar. He said that Hamas, unlike the Islamic State terrorist group, operates only in Israel, the Gaza Strip and West Bank.

What Mashaal forgot to mention in the interview was that Hamas and the Islamic State do have at least one thing in common: they both carry out extrajudicial executions as a means of terrorizing and intimidating those who stand in their way or dare to challenge their terrorism.

Even the Palestinian Authority [PA] now seems to be drawing an analogy between Hamas and the Islamic State and other radical Islamist terrorist groups.

Tayeb Abdel Rahim, a senior aide to Mahmoud Abbas, strongly condemned Hamas's extrajudicial executions, adding that that they are "reminiscent of the summary executions carried out by Wahhabi militant groups in other parts of the Middle East."

Abdel Rahim added, "The executions were done in cold blood and according to Hamas law, which is: Who is not with Hamas is against it."

Under Palestinian Authority law, all death sentences must be approved by the president of the PA. But in 2005, PA President Mahmoud Abbas issued a moratorium on death sentences -- a prohibition that did not stop Hamas from pursuing executions under the pretext that the PA president was no longer a legitimate leader since his term had expired in 2009.

It is notable that the latest executions in the Gaza Strip were carried out after the formation of the Hamas-backed Palestinian "national consensus" government a few months ago. These extrajudicial executions show that despite the unity agreement between the two parties, Hamas continues to act as the sole authority in the Gaza Strip, where it has its own security forces, militias and "revolutionary courts."

It is also ironic that Hamas has chosen to execute suspected "collaborators" at a time when it is seen as part of the "national consensus" government that continues to conduct security coordination with Israel. According to Hamas's logic, all members of the Palestinian government are "traitors" who should also be dragged to public squares and the yards of mosques to be shot by firing squads.
According to the same logic, Abbas himself should also be executed for maintaining security coordination and talking to Israelis.

Hamas does not even need to interrogate or hold a trial for Abbas because he recently announced, during a meeting with Israelis in his office in Ramallah, that "security coordination with Israel is sacred."

Sources in the Gaza Strip said that the executed men were affiliated with Fatah and had been suspected of maintaining contact with senior Fatah officials in Ramallah and some Arab countries. As for the two executed women, the sources said that their only fault was that they had been observed by neighbors asking too many questions about Palestinians who were killed in Israeli airstrikes in the Gaza Strip over the past few weeks.

Hamas's hysteria has seen it turn not only on its political rivals in Fatah and innocent Palestinians, but also against its own followers. According to sources in the Gaza Strip, Hamas arrested more than 250 of its own members after Israel last week killed its three top military commanders, Raed al-Attar, Mohamed Abu Shamaleh and Mohamed Barhoum.

Popular anger and anguish over teens’ murders not assuaged by bombing empty Hamas buildings

DEBKAfile Special Report July 1, 2014, 5:56 PM (IDT)

Tags:  Hebron,  teens,  IDF,  Israeli Air Force,  Gaza,  Hamas terror,  Israel government,

Funerals of three murdered boys in Modi'in

The funerals of Eyal Yifrach, Gil-Ad Shaer and Naftali Frenkel, Tuesday, July 1, whose parents decided to bury them side by side in Modi’in, midway between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, have become a national event, drawing many tens of thousands of sorrowing sympathizers from every segment of the population. Their anguish over the senseless murders of the three boys shortly after they were kidnapped on June 10 on their way home, is mixed with anger and demands for real retribution. They will not be satisfied with the government’s knee-jerk order to bomb empty Hamas and Jihad Islami facilities overnight, shortly after their bodies were found in a shallow grave in Kachil, a Palestinian village north of Hebron.

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s sorrowful words to this mass of mourners won’t assuage their fury.
They will watch him tensely to make good on his vow:
“Hamas is responsible, and Hamas will pay,” backed up Tuesday by Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon. He said: “The blood of the killers is on their heads” and the price Hamas pays will be “heavy indeed.”

Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman has called for a military operation against Hamas in Gaza on the same lines as the Jenin cleanup campaign, which finally terminated the four-year Palestinian suicide bombing war against Israeli towns in 2004. He linked the kidnaps and the unending rocket attacks from Gaza as part of Hamas’s muscle-flexing exercise to hasten its seizure of the West Bank from the Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas.

This design must be thwarted by uprooting Hamas’s Gaza infrastructure and operational arms, said Lieberman, no doubt recalling how the delay in the Jenin operation encouraged a lethal upsurge of Palestinian terror before it was cut down.

The suspected kidnappers, named Marwan Qawasmeh and Amer Abu Ayshe by the Shin Bet three days into the massive search on the West Bank for the boys and their abductors, are still being sought.
But meanwhile their homes were blown up.

Trade and Industry minister Naftali Bennett urges the annexation of the parts of the West Bank settled by Jews and more settlement.

Other ministers in the Netanyahu government urge substantial punishment for the Islamist Hamas and its terrorist networks, if only as a deterrent for any future kidnap attempts and an immediate halt to its rocket attacks.

One or two ministers echo the sentiments of foreign condolers. Israelis are outraged when world leaders like US President Barack Obama and UN Secretary Ban Ki-moon and an organization like the International Red Cross urged “restraint on both sides,” as though the perpetrators and their victims were equally to blame for the atrocity committed against the three Israeli teenagers.

Military and intelligence sources have warned the ministers in discussions on national security that if Hamas is not stopped in its tracks, Israel will soon see the black flags of Al Qaeda and ISIS pushing towards its borders, through doors opened by their ally, the extremist Islamist Hamas.

In the northern Syrian town of Raqqa, the Iraqi jihadis paraded Scud D surface rockets capable of reaching Israel, Iraq and Jordan. Photos of the parade appeared Tuesday in a number of web sites and social media  Western weapons experts who saw them judged them “likely inoperable.” However, according to debkafile’s military experts, the Al Qaeda-linked group has been able to seize large Syrian and Iraqi army arsenals in recent weeks and has not qualms about using them.

No one doubts the IDF’s rare capabilities and skills in counter-terror combat. But when politicians are too weak to exercise them, they are eating away at Israel deterrent strength.

Bombing empty buildings gives Hamas a blank check to carry on kidnapping Israelis and shooting rockets. It will not persuade Abbas to break up his unity pact with Hamas, provide security for nearly a million Israelis in daily peril of rockets, or stop Western leaders pontificating against Israel’s “lack of restraint.”

debkafile reported earflier Tuesday:
Monday night, June 30, the Israeli Air Force bombed 34 Hamas and Jihad Islami facilities in the Gaza Strip while, in the West Bank town of Hebron, soldiers demolished sections of buildings inhabited by the kidnappers who murdered the three Israeli teenagers Eyal Yifrach, Gil-Ad Shaer and Naftali Frenkel.

Their bodies were found during the day abandoned in the rocky field of a Palestinian village after a nerve-wracking 18-day hunt. The Israeli cabinet went into emergency session Monday night after the discovery and will continue sitting Tuesday to decide on fitting punishment for this shocking crime. Meanwhile, air force planes and drones struck 34 empty Hamas and Jihad Islami facilities in the Gaza Strip, from which the terrorists had fled to safety in good time.

debkafile: The ministers and army chiefs knew that the enemy, which kidnapped and murdered the three teens in cold blood, would again escape harm and, worse still, lose none of their capacity to continue harassing southern Israel with a rocket blitz.

And indeed, the Israeli air bombardment was followed immediately by three rockets launched from the Gaza Strip against the Eshkol District. They damaged buildings. There were no Israeli casualties.
The two Palestinian terrorist groups were making it clear that should Israel intensify its punishment for the boys’ murders, they too were fully capable of answering back with heavier and more precise guided rocket strikes against the Israeli population.

debkafile’s military sources: Both the IDF and Hamas-Gaza have evidently opted for a controlled confrontation until one of the two adversaries determines how to proceed next. Israel’s deliberations continue Tuesday amid pressing demands by Israelis, stunned by the tragedy, for action to hurt the terrorists where it counts and deter them from ever again abducting an Israeli.

The statement Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu issued from the cabinet meeting Monday night was a clear vow: “Hamas is responsible, and Hamas will pay.”

On the West Bank, Israeli soldiers early Tuesday razed sections of the Hebron homes of the two Hamas activists, Marwan Qawasmeh, 37, and Omar Abu Aysha, 33, who are held guilty of the kidnap and murder of the three Israeli boys. The attorney general who was first consulted ruled that the demolition of the large dwellings must be confined to the sections inhabited by the two men.

The half a million population of the Hebron district, where the kidnaps and murders took place, has been placed under lockdown for the hunt for the perpetrators, who have not been seen since the kidnapping occurred on June 10.

According to Israeli intelligence, they are still holed up somewhere in this district. At some points, Palestinian youths stormed the soldiers who opened fire to repel them.

Near Jerusalem, an Israeli woman of 21 was rescued from a house in Beit Jallah, which adjoins the Jerusalem suburb of Gilo, claiming she had been snatched by Palestinians. Heavy army and policy forces, moved into this Palestinian location to retrieve her. Her claim is being investigated.

In a separate incident, Israeli soldiers on a counter-terror operation in the Jenin refugee camp further north came under attack. A Palestinian mob hurling firebombs, rocks, explosives and iron bars was broken up when the Israeli soldiers began shooting. One of the assailants was shot dead.

Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas was on the phone to world leaders Monday night and early Tuesday to plead with them to hold Israel, driven to retaliate for the teenagers’ murders, in check.

No decisions were reached in Ramallah about the future of the unity government Abbas sealed with Hamas last month.

In his message of condolences to the Israeli nation, US President Barack Obama urged “all parties to “refrain from steps that could further destabilize the situation” and encouraged Israel and the Palestinians “to work together to find those responsible for the crime with US support.”