Israel is aiding criminal gangs in Rafah, some of who are affiliated with the Islamic State (IS), to loot humanitarian aid under military protection, sources in Gaza, including civil society leaders, police officials, and a UN official, have told The New Arab.
While refusing to intervene against these armed criminals, Israeli forces are opening fire against local policemen attempting to prevent the looting.
Sources in Gaza say the rise of organised gangs is Israel’s latest pretext to prevent the entry of humanitarian aid and cause societal collapse, all while blaming Palestinians for their own suffering.
The Israeli government is also using this lawlessness to promote the idea of allowing foreign private security companies to operate in Gaza under a ‘humanitarian guise’.
The local police along with militants from Hamas and other armed factions have now declared war on criminal gangs to restore some public order.
Israeli-sponsored looting in broad daylight
On 18 November, UN agencies finally managed to obtain entry for 109 trucks into southern Gaza after months of extreme Israeli restrictions that brought Gazans’ daily food intake down to 187-454 grams per person in October.
Before Israel’s war at least 500 trucks were entering Gaza per working day, which was still not enough to meet the population’s daily needs.
This small humanitarian success didn’t last long, however, as 98 of the trucks were looted by armed gangs in an area declared a “kill zone” under full Israeli military control, where no Palestinian is allowed.
A UN official told The New Arab that two of the trucks attempted to make it to the northern half of Gaza after obtaining the necessary permits from Israel, only to be stopped by the Israeli army for five hours at the Netzarim Corridor, which led to them being looted.
Both incidents exacerbated the levels of acute starvation present in southern Gaza and created giant queues outside the few remaining bakeries in Deir al-Balah.
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Far from being exceptions, ambushes of humanitarian aid have become routine in Gaza. According to an internal UN memo, the Israeli army is providing “passive” and even “active” protection to armed criminal gangs who have established a “military-like compound” in an area of eastern Rafah “restricted, controlled and patrolled by the IDF”.
If a Palestinian civilian attempted to reach this area on foot he would instantly be targeted by Israeli drones or troops. In contrast, gang members are operating in the same zone with AK-47s and other weapons a mere 100 meters away from Israeli soldiers and tanks without being harmed.
Two sources in Gaza’s police force and a civil society leader who spoke to The New Arab said that the Israeli army never opens fire on armed gang members looting trucks at gunpoint, but targets local policemen attempting to stop the looting.
Another way local sources say Israel is encouraging looting is by banning cigarettes from entering Gaza but simultaneously allowing them to be smuggled inside the contents of aid trucks. This has led prices for a single pack to skyrocket to over $500, incentivising criminal gangs to loot aid trucks and scatter their contents looking for hidden cigarettes.
Israel could easily prevent this by simply allowing cigarettes to enter Gaza legally or thwarting smuggling attempts. A senior EU official told The New Arab that the Israeli military thoroughly inspects the contents of each truck going into Gaza and would many times prevent a truck from going in if they find a “nail clipper or a tent in the wrong colour”.
Cigarette smuggling in aid trucks is therefore seen as a deliberate attempt to incite lawlessness.
Two warlords lead the gangs
Two wanted criminals are thought to be behind the main gangs looting most of the aid in Gaza, police sources told The New Arab.
Together, they have set up organised gangs of around 200 people and have their own warehouses where they store looted goods and later sell them for profit to local traders.
The gangs also extort humanitarian aid groups by demanding “protection fees” of over $4,000 per truck to allow safe passage without being looted. Israel even recommended that NGOs pay bribes via a specific company that acts as an intermediary.
The first gang leader is Yasser Abu Shabab, a drug dealer who had been convicted and jailed in Gaza multiple times until police released him during the ongoing war.
Last week, policemen and Hamas militants attempted to eliminate Abu Shabab in an ambush that killed 11 members of his gang, including his brother and partner, Fathi, and the gang’s accountant. Thirty others were wounded, according to police reports seen by The New Arab.
A day later, Abu Shabab retaliated by looting a fuel truck, burning another, and preventing others from reaching the Kerem Shalom crossing to pick up aid from the Israeli side, according to local sources.
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The second gang leader is Shadi al-Soufi, a convicted murderer and son of an alleged collaborator with Israel. Al-Soufi was sentenced to death in 2020 for murdering Jabr al-Qeeq, a senior member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). Al-Qeeq himself was imprisoned by Israel for 15 years for taking part in purging collaborators in Gaza during the First Intifada, one of whom was al-Soufi’s father.
Al-Soufi was captured by Gazan police in a special operation in late 2020. His clan, Al-Tarabin, announced the same year that Shadi had escaped to Sinai, before emerging again in Gaza after the Israeli ground invasion.
Last week, Shadi appeared in online footage denying the allegations against him, but police sources insist he is the leader of some of these gangs. In mid-October, Gaza’s Interior Security agency issued a warrant for Shadi’s arrest for interrogation.
Gaza security forces attempted to eliminate al-Soufi in an ambush in late September, a source close to the police told The New Arab, but they misidentified his vehicle and accidentally killed a humanitarian worker, Islam Hijazi.
Police sources say that both Abu Shabab and al-Soufi have links to Islamic State groups in Sinai that facilitate smuggling into Gaza.
Israel is arming criminal gangs
A former senior Palestinian Authority official, who is currently helping INGOs obtain Israeli permits for the entry of aid to Gaza, told The New Arab that when Israeli forces raid an area they deliberately leave behind light weapons on the corpses of Hamas combatants so they can be collected by gangs and clans when the army leaves.
Local Palestinian reporters have corroborated this, saying prominent gangs that loot aid have obtained some of their weapons this way.
Israel is also suspected of directly providing arms to gangs. In March, the Israeli army explicitly said it was considering arming clans in Gaza that were rivals with Hamas. Some have links to the Islamic State and Al-Qaeda, such as the Doghmush clan.
The Israeli government envisioned putting those clans in charge of distributing aid, managing Gaza’s day-to-day governance and security, and running “Hamas-free zones”.
In August this year, unusual footage emerged of teenagers and young men from a clan in Deir al-Balah parading brand-new US-made M-16 rifles in the middle of the street in broad daylight and confidently firing shots in the air without being targeted by the Israeli army, which was operating less than a kilometre away.
What made the incident even more remarkable is that Israel has near-constant drone surveillance of the entire Gaza Strip, and walking around with a gun would immediately render you a target for the Israeli army to bomb or attack. Yet the Israeli military did nothing to those armed men.
Joe Saba, for example, the Chairman of the Board of Directors of ANERA, said in October, citing discussions with Israeli officials, that if a Gazan civilian attempts to defend his home from looters with a handgun an Israeli drone would instantly incriminate said civilian as a “legitimate target”.
Even more intriguing is that M-16 rifles are scarce in Gaza, where armed groups rely on smuggled AK-47s, which increased suspicions that Israel is providing those weapons to sow chaos.
Pretext to ban aid
Last Tuesday, Israel’s government admitted that it had been banning the entry of commercial goods to the private sector in Gaza since October 2024, when Israel began implementing the ‘Generals Plan’, a strategy to starve Gazans into submission.
In response to a petition filed to Israel’s Supreme Court by Israeli human rights organisations like Gisha, Netanyahu’s government cited the looting of aid by criminal gangs as grounds for such a ban, claiming that “aid organisations struggle to deliver aid for various reasons that are not related to the IDF”.
But as Gisha itself highlighted, Israel is the party responsible for the collapsing infrastructure and blocked roads in Gaza due to Israeli shelling, as well as the collapse of law and order as a result of systematically targeting the local government and law enforcement personnel.
Muhammad Shehada is a Palestinian writer and analyst from Gaza and the EU Affairs Manager at Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor.
Follow him on Twitter: @muhammadshehad2
