A Hamas military court in the Gaza Strip sentenced to death four Palestinians convicted for being collaborators with Israel in absentia, a senior judiciary official said Wednesday.
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Gun-wielding masked militants from the group were seen attending his funeral in the Jabalia refugee camp.
An Israeli army spokesperson told Ma’an that Israeli military forces in cooperation with the Israeli Security Agency targeted a “terrorist cell planning to detonate an explosive device against Israeli forces” stationed on the borderline.
The second is that an Israeli effort to locate and destroy the tunnels will lead the heads of Hamas’ military wing – Mohammed Deif, Marwan Issa and Yahya Sanwar – to stage a preemptive strike, despite the heavy price the Strip is liable to pay.
During the 2014 summer war with Israel in Gaza, men wearing uniforms of the armed wing of Hamas riddled with bullets six alleged collaborators outside Gaza City’s main mosque as worshipers left after midday prayers.
In a separate statement, Salah Bardawil, an official from Gaza’s ruling Islamic Hamas movement, said Israel was “playing with fire” in the airstrike.
Before these sentences, 167 people had been sentenced to death by courts in Gaza and the occupied West Bank, according to the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights.
The Gaza Strip has remained largely calm, though violent protests have broken out along the heavily guarded border and a number of Palestinians have been killed during clashes with Israeli forces.
The wave of attacks has been partly fuelled by Palestinian frustration over the collapse of peace talks, the growth of Jewish settlements on land they seek for a future state and Islamist calls for the destruction of Israel. Hamas used the tunnels to conduct surprise attacks on Israeli soldiers in 2014, killing several in October of that year.
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Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip more than a decade ago, but it continues to control all aspects of life in the Palestinian territory, deciding who can enter or leave.
