Two of the executed were charged with collaboration with Israel
For the first time in five years, Hamas, in power in the Gaza Strip, executed five Palestinians this Sunday, two of them for “cooperation” with Israel and three others on criminal matters, Hamas announced in a statement from the armed Islamist movement. The note also assures that everyone “had full prior rights to defend themselves” before the local justice system.
The Interior Ministry of the Gaza Strip, a Palestinian territory of 2.3 million people under Hamas control since 2007, has released the year of birth and other details of each case, but not the identities of those executed.
The two convicted of collaboration with Israel are two men born in 1968 and 1978. The eldest of them is a Khan Younis (south) resident who was hanged. He was punished by the local justice system for providing Israel with “information about members of the resistance, where they live” and “the location of missile production and launch sites” since 1991, Hamas said.
The second was shot for having provided Israel with information since 2001 leading to “the attack and martyrdom of civilians” by Israeli forces, he added. The other three executed had previously been convicted of murder, Hamas’s interior ministry said in the statement.
In recent years, Gaza authorities have sentenced several people to death for various crimes or for collaborating with the State of Israel, although these death sentences have not been enforced. The last known executions date back to 2017. Three Palestinians -Ashraf Abú Leila, Hisham al-Alul and Abdalá al-Nashar- were publicly executed after being convicted in a quick trial before local military justice for participating in the murder. from a Hamas commander, Mazen Faqha, “on behalf of Israel.”
As in the case of the two executed for collaborating with Israel this Sunday, Hamas justified the 2017 executions by relying on the revolutionary code of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). Hamas, however, is not part of the PLO, whose revolutionary code has become obsolete on the death penalty related to the Palestinian Basic Law of 2003. The Palestinian Authority, led by Mahmud Abas, also signed up to the Convention of the UN to abolish the death penalty.
Since Hamas Islamists took power in the Gaza Strip in 2007 by force of arms, to the detriment of supporters of Mahmoud Abbas’s predominantly secular Fatah party, the Palestinian territories have been deeply divided politically.
Mahmoud Abbas’s Palestinian Authority, based in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, has no control over the Gaza Strip, a sparse Palestinian territory dominated by Hamas for 15 years and under strict Israeli blockade.
Source: La Verdad
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