Israel’s decades-long strategy has been to cultivate and arm Hamas rivals in areas under its control in the Gaza Strip.
Armed and masked Palestinian men patrol openly, sometimes in pickup trucks with Hebrew stickers. Their ostentatious video shows other signs as well. In one, they smoke Israeli cigarettes instead of cheaper Egyptian cigarettes.
Young people tend to wear vests and pack spare cartridges for their radios and rifles. Videos posted on Telegram show people wearing bulletproof vests, carrying Glock pistols in leather holsters and taking selfies with cellphones.
Israeli drones will monitor from above and images will be sent to a small control room, said an Israeli official who spoke on condition of anonymity. Israeli soldiers are also not far behind, what the leader of the emerging armed group claims is a “coordinator” who shows up regularly to bring weapons, food and vehicles.
“Nothing is forbidden for us,” said Hassam al-Astar, 50, the leader of one such group, the self-proclaimed Anti-Terrorist Strike Force.
To prove where his loyalties lie, Astal last month filmed himself burning a Hamas flag. He told the Financial Times that he wanted to create a sectarian-free Gaza with the support of anyone who would lend a hand, including Israel.
The so-called Yellow Zone is named after the color of the line that has bisected Gaza since the cease-fire. Only a few thousand Palestinians are thought to live there, with the majority of the territory’s more than 2 million people forced into the other half, which is under Hamas control.
In this desolate and hazy landscape, Israel is repeating the tactics it has used for decades to arm and cultivate militias in enemy territory.
In Iraq under Saddam Hussein’s regime, Mossad (Israel’s secret service agency) helped arm Kurdish separatists. In Syria, the Israeli military helped the Druze minority establish a de facto buffer zone along the border.
Most notoriously, however, the country supported Lebanese Christian militias for almost two decades, before being forced to withdraw and withdraw their representatives in 2000.
The fact that the tactic failed in Lebanon didn’t stop Israel from trying again, said Gonen Yitzhak, a former senior official with Israel’s domestic intelligence agency Shin Bet, which recruited Palestinian informants and collaborators in the occupied West Bank.
“This is how Israel has been dragged into the shifting sands of Lebanon, and we will continue to be dragged in the same way by the shifting sands of Gaza.” “If we, as Israelis, think that we can arm some factions in Gaza and that ultimately these munitions and other military knowledge will not be used against Israel, we are truly foolish.”
In Gaza, wartime Israeli bombing forced Hamas underground, giving way to criminal organizations, rival Islamic militias and even Hamas prison escapees. It was fertile recruiting ground for Israel’s military intelligence unit, Unit 504, which has long been tasked with recruiting Arab informants, two people familiar with the situation said.
Along with the Shin Bet, Unit 504 was instrumental in splitting Beirut into rival sectors after the 1982 Israeli invasion, pitting Christian militias against Palestinian extremists and Syrian intelligence, and also helped create Israel’s ally South Lebanon Army.
Members of the force, who speak Arabic, were sent with combat troops to interrogate captured Palestinians after a Hamas terrorist attack sparked war in Gaza on Oct. 7, 2023, a person familiar with the operation said.
But Israeli officials briefed on the plan said the military intelligence directorate’s mission would soon become broader, to create chaos in Gaza by recruiting and possibly arming rivals in areas where Hamas was retreating.
Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu publicly acknowledged this secret policy this year, saying it had allowed “the activation of clans in Gaza opposed to Hamas.”
Few expected the mission to create a worthy rival for Hamas, a politically and militarily large terrorist group with tens of thousands of members and a vast network of underground tunnels, seen by Palestinians as a resistance to Israeli occupation.
“There was still a chance. Hamas’s enemies could become its friends,” said Yigal Shiri, who studies the recent rise of Gaza militias at the Meir Amit Information Center. “Not everyone has to make a deal with Israel, but Israel had the opportunity to attack its enemies.”
“The situation is complex and sensitive,” said Amjad Iraq, senior Israeli-Palestinian analyst at the International Crisis Group. “Some groups are known to be collaborating with Israelis, while others are criminal organizations and clans seeking to establish themselves as stronger and more powerful in Gaza’s future.”
Former and current Israeli intelligence officials say the 504th and Shin Bet appear to have supported militias of varying strength, most of which are now concentrated in the Yellow Zone.
They range from the People’s Army, a militia led by Yasser Abu Shabaab that controls land near the Rafah border with Egypt, to the small Astal counterterrorism force operating near Khan Yunis, a former Hamas stronghold.
How they work is still unknown. Astal claimed that its relationship with Israeli security coordinators is similar to the one that Palestinian security officials and Israeli security coordinators in the West Bank have had for decades.
“I’m talking directly to the military, we have a coordinator, about whether we want to bring food and whether we want to bring 50 or 100 people,” he said.
Astar, a former official with the secular nationalist Fatah faction, fled Gaza in 2007 when Hamas seized control of the strip and hundreds of Fatah officials were deported to the West Bank by Israeli forces.
Returning to Gaza several years later, Astar said he was arrested as an Israeli collaborator and only escaped during an Israeli bombing raid in December 2023, after the war began.
Astar, who blames Hamas for bringing Israel’s destructive forces into Gaza, said he decided to start the militia after his daughter was killed in an Israeli attack on a Hamas cell in the family camp area earlier this year. The FT was unable to verify this claim.
Since then, he has strengthened his small area of control within a kilometer of Israeli military positions, Israeli officials said. “They don’t bother us,” he said.
The Israel Defense Forces declined to comment on its relationship with these clans, how it evaluates them, and whether there are plans to disband and evacuate them once the war with Hamas ends.
This nascent Israeli plan faced its first test but failed just hours after a ceasefire brokered by US President Donald Trump last month.
Once Hamas emerged from the tunnels, its members reasserted their side of the Yellow Line’s primacy in a series of public assassinations, classifying both criminals and captured rival militia members as Israeli collaborators.
Without a trial or evidence, they opened fire in Gaza City’s main square. One of Hamas’s bloodiest retaliatory operations was against members of the larger Dogmosh clan, a potential challenger within Hamas-controlled territory.
The group has long-standing ties to Fatah and includes everything from criminals to doctors and teachers to a small Islamist group considered more radical than Hamas.
When Hamas went into hiding during the war, some members profited by stealing and reselling aid and hoarding weapons purchased from defectors, according to Israeli officials familiar with the matter.
But after Israel withdrew from Gaza City, the clan’s stronghold, under a cease-fire deal, Hamas killed dozens of Dogmosh members during a hunt for collaborators, said Nizar Dogmosh, head of the clan council.
Nizar acknowledged in an interview that the Israeli military had been in contact with some members of the group, but said the group “categorically refused” to cooperate.
“Hamas initially said, ‘We will capture those who collaborated with the occupation,’ and we said that was fine,” Nizar said. “But they surprised us with large-scale and ferocious attacks on all members of the group. Hamas wants to assert its ability to control Gaza.”
On the Israeli side of the Yellow Line, other challenges lie ahead for Tel Aviv and its potential allies. The Trump administration views the border as temporary, and Israeli troops are expected to withdraw as Hamas disarms and hands over security control to the yet-to-be-formed International Stabilization Force.
This will force Israel to decide whether to continue accepting collaborators and give cities with large Palestinian populations, such as Ramul and Lod, a new identity and home.
Gadi Hittman, a professor at Ariel University in occupied West Bank settlements, said that “what Israel will do is pure speculation” when the Yellow Line moves. “Israel will make every effort to save those who helped us. We will not use or discard our colleagues. But do you guarantee that you will be able to save everyone? No one will be saved.”
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