It is not possible for Israel's warplanes to see everything, so its eyes on the ground are its collaborators. They had always been bothersome for the Resistance, beginning with field operatives to moles in the armed wings. In the third war on Gaza, stories about collaborators were sparse but present nonetheless.
Gaza – A close reading of the book He Who Comes to Kill Youby Israeli author Yaakov Peri – who used to head [the Israeli security service] Shabak – provides a good understanding of the use of spies by the Israeli intelligence service. They obtain the smallest of details about their adversaries and are impossible to detect by surveillance devices.
This practice by Israel is well-known, as it would not go to war without setting a target bank in advance. This time, however, Gaza's terrain contradicted all its enemies’ expectations. The Resistance limited the presence of collaborators, through the iron security grip of Hamas' security forces, in addition to the military wings of Resistance factions and their special units in charge of the matter.
In previous wars, stories about spies were rampant. One of them swallowed a SIM card to prevent people from knowing who he was calling when people started getting suspicious. Another did not know that the house he identified as belonging to a Resistance fighter based on outdated information had been rented out to a new family, who became casualties when the house was bombed.
Today, however, it is the collaborators who are under threat, especially when some of them were summarily executed. This probably kept them away from the streets in the ongoing war, according to security sources in Gaza who refused to be identified.
The security sources revealed to Al-Akhbar that Internal Security Forces detained four people suspected of communicating with the occupation. Two were arrested near the Hamas al-Aqsa satellite channel around noon. One was in his fifties and the other in his late teens.
According to the sources, the two detainees were arrested following a tip to the security forces from a resident of the area about two suspicious persons monitoring activities in the area. They are currently being questioned.
Meanwhile, sources from the Internal Security Forces maintained that they had foiled several attempts by collaborators to contact the occupation and provide information to the Shabak about the location of rockets being fired from Gaza into the occupied territories.
According to eyewitnesses in Rafah, unidentified gunmen executed a person said to be providing the occupation with information about the Resistance early Sunday morning. According to field testimonies, collaborator M. M. was interrogated for several days and had confessed to being involved in tracking Resistance fighters in the southern part of the Strip.
According to observers, such measures were the reason why so much information was kept from the occupation. This became more evident when it lost several of its collaborators during a campaign by Gaza's former government, asking collaborators to "repent" and ensuring that their lives will be safeguarded.
Ever since, security circles in Tel Aviv began admitting their failure to obtain precise information about the location of rocket launchers and arms depots. This led them to consider a ground war, especially after the Israeli air force was unsuccessful in targeting those who launch the rockets.
In conjunction with this report, spokesperson for the former Gaza Interior Ministry, Iyad al-Bazm, issued a press statement confirming the operations by the Internal Security Forces against suspects and collaborators, who are being closely watched. "We foiled several of those treacherous attempts against the Resistance," he said and warned the suspects of any "cowardly act against the Palestinians and their home front."
However, there was a clear Palestinian demand through social media to prohibit the broadcasting of images and videos of collaborator executions, in addition to providing them with a fair trial or keep them in custody until the end of the war. But this is a difficult choice for concerned authorities, due to the heavy shelling of facilities, houses, or any place where the spies could be kept.
Such calls are based on an incident in 2012, when activists published the images of six collaborators being dragged in the streets of Gaza. Their bodies sustained extreme injuries, leading to an outcry and demands to prevent this from happening, especially due to the damage it can do to their relatives. Calls were made to prevent the execution of collaborators without a court order.
On the other hand, political and security analyst Hani al-Basous spoke to Al-Akhbar about the "depletion of Israel's bank of targets," evidenced by the Israeli air force targeting civilian homes and threats of a ground invasion. "This proves that the occupation is bankrupt, failing on the security level. It is clearly facing a crisis of information in the Strip," he said.
"Israel's failure to reach the leaders of the Resistance or locate the weapons depots and rocket positions, despite the occupation's intelligence and military capacity, is the best proof that it faces a crisis of information. One of its main reasons is the absence of the role of field collaborators," he explained.
This leads Basous to commend the security forces working to eliminate the phenomenon "by executing some of the collaborators and opening the door for the repentance of many from time to time." Officially, the judicial department of the former Hamas government had implemented several executions against collaborators in the past five years.
This article is an edited translation from the Arabic Edition.
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