Yasser Abu Shabab, Israel’s man in Gaza, was killed last week in Rafah. In Gaza, Jordan, Egypt, Lebanon, and elsewhere in the Arab world, videos on social media showed people distributing sweets and drinks in celebration of his death.
The rise of Abu Shabab, 38, from local criminal to the public face of a pro-Israel militia in Gaza exposed one of the most controversial Israeli experiments of the war: arming local armed groups consisting of outlaws, former Islamic State (IS) group militants, and drug traffickers to challenge Hamas.
No one else in the entire Gaza Strip was willing to collaborate with Israel.
A member of the Tarabin Bedouin tribe in Rafah, Abu Shabab first surfaced in the public record as a small-time gangster convicted of arms dealing and cross-border smuggling between Gaza and Sinai who was arrested and imprisoned by Hamas in 2015.
He escaped custody amid the chaos of the October 2023 war and reconstituted himself as an armed strongman in the years that followed.
By 2024-2025, Abu Shabab had reorganised his followers into what came to be known as the “Popular Forces” – a loose network of fighters and clan-based gunmen operating mainly in eastern Rafah and parts of Khan Yunis.
The group presented itself as a “force for local order” “protecting” humanitarian corridors and pushing back against what it called “Hamas’ abuses.”
In practice, international and regional reporting, including in UN documents, described the Popular Forces as a hybrid militia, part clan militia and part gang, accused repeatedly of looting aid convoys, running protection rackets, smuggling, and other criminal enterprises that flourished amid Gaza’s breakdown of governance.
This criminal character was why many Palestinians despised Abu Shabab and denounced him as a collaborator.
Israel’s tacit backing changed the scale and profile of Abu Shabab’s operations. In mid-2025, Israeli officials publicly acknowledged programmes that provided weapons and space to certain anti-Hamas clans and factions in a policy meant to create local counterweights to Hamas and to secure parts of Rafah without direct Israeli occupation.
Abu Shabab’s militia were among the most prominent beneficiaries, and they acquired heavier arms and gained de facto freedom of movement in zones near Israeli positions. For Israeli strategists who favoured local proxies as a low-cost way to keep up the pressure on Hamas, Abu Shabab offered the prospect of a home-grown force that could police Gaza’s south, albeit one with reputational and legal liabilities.
That same empowerment sharpened internal resentments. Humanitarian groups and Palestinian journalists and analysts repeatedly accused Abu Shabab’s men of abusing civilians, seizing aid, detaining rivals, and operating with impunity because of their connections to Israeli security.
One of the most visible and traumatic allegations later amplified in Palestinian media and human-rights reporting concerned a nurse, Tasneem Al-Hams. Multiple local outlets and monitoring groups reported that she was abducted in October this year by men linked to Abu Shabab’s network and subsequently handed over to Israeli authorities. She was later released and recounted what had happened in interviews.
Human-rights monitors who investigated the case warned that the method of the abduction and the vehicle movements pointed to involvement by actors operating from areas under Israeli control or by armed groups with Israeli coordination. Those findings inflamed local anger and became part of the broader narrative of Abu Shabab’s militia abuses.
Tensions between Abu Shabab’s fighters and Hamas (and with other local families) repeatedly exploded into violence. In late November, the Popular Forces published footage claiming to show it detaining several Hamas operatives.
Other local channels reported instances in which Abu Shabab militia men captured, interrogated, and in some cases killed fighters they identified as belonging to the Qassam Brigades, Hamas’ military wing.
These incidents, often recorded as forced confessions or by paraded detainees, were presented by Abu Shabab’s group as proof it was actively dismantling Hamas networks. For many Gazans, though, the spectacle looked like an Israeli proxy policing operation, provoking retaliation from families and factions aligned with or sympathetic to the resistance.
On 4 December, this combustible mixture erupted into the incident that cost Abu Shabab his life. Palestinian sources and the Popular Forces’ own statements describe an attack by a local family, reported as the Abu Suneima clan, on a Popular Forces base in Rafah after the militia allegedly took a family member hostage.
The clash quickly escalated into heavy fighting. Israeli and some Hebrew-language outlets offer a different emphasis. Citing Israeli security sources, Ynet, an Israeli outlet, and others have reported that Abu Shabab was not killed in a gunfight with rivals but was fatally beaten during an internal dispute tied to disagreements over the militia’s cooperation with Israel.
Other reports combine both versions, saying that a brawl escalated to gunfire in which Abu Shabab was badly injured and later died. Whatever the precise chain of events, the event exposed the fragility of the Popular Forces as a one-man scheme whose cohesion collapsed when clan loyalties and criminal rivalries overwhelmed it.
Abu Shabab’s deputy Ghassan Al-Duhaini has surfaced as the successor figure. Western and regional analysts have noted Al-Duhaini’s checkered past as a former Palestinian Authority officer who later served in Salafi-jihadist groups with IS allegiances in Gaza and ties to Sinai networks and a man who, like many in the Popular Forces leadership, had moved between militias, smuggling networks, and criminal gangs.
Israeli analysts have openly warned that some of the commanders Israel has cooperated with have historical links to jihadi groups in Sinai and Gaza, even if the new arrangements made them temporary partners against Hamas.
Al-Duhaini and other Popular Forces commanders have long been associated with drug-trafficking, smuggling, and other criminal rackets, with some Israeli security sources describing past smuggling ties to IS Sinai’s arms and contraband networks.
According to local independent news website the Palestinian Journalism Network, Al-Duhaini ran prostitution rings and was personally involved in vice.
What Israel apparently envisioned for Abu Shabab was bluntly practical: a local force that could counter Hamas’ influence in Rafah and create pockets of relative control, all the while avoiding overt Israeli occupation or governance responsibilities.
The idea was that a network of clan-based militias would provide a buffer and do the dirty work of policing Hamas.
Abu Shabab’s example shows that gamble’s peril: empowering men with criminal records and doubtful legitimacy can buy short-term tactical advantages, but it seeds deep resentment and produces unpredictable, violent blowback.
In death, Abu Shabab has become a symbol for critics on all sides and proof that using armed gangs as political instruments in a fractured society is both morally fraught and strategically fragile.
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