In the half of Gaza in Israel’s control, a peculiar – and combustible – experiment is under way.
Masked Palestinian gunmen ride in the open, sometimes in trucks with Hebrew decals still visible. Their swaggering videos carry more hints: in one, they smoke Israeli cigarettes, in particular the Marlboro Flavour Mix, instead of cheaper Egyptian ones.
The young men often wear tactical vests, bristling with radios and extra magazines for their assault rifles; others can be seen in the videos posted on Telegram wearing Kevlar, taking selfies on phones, with Glock handguns nestled in leather holsters.
Israeli drones watch from the skies above, the feeds going to a small control room, according to an Israeli official speaking on the condition of anonymity. Israeli soldiers are not far away, as is what the leader of one nascent clique of gunmen claims is a “co-ordinator” who checks in regularly, bringing weapons, food and vehicles.
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“Nothing is forbidden to us,” said Hussam al-Astal, the 50-year-old leader of one of these groups, the self-styled Counter-Terrorism Strike Force.
To prove where his allegiances lie, Astal last month filmed himself burning a Hamas flag. He told the Financial Times he hoped to create a Hamas-free Gaza with support from anyone “who will place his hand in mine” – even Israel.
This is the “Yellow Zone”, as one former Israeli intelligence officer described it, named after the colour of the line that has since the ceasefire split Gaza in two.
Only a few thousand Palestinians are believed to live there, with the vast majority of the enclave’s more than two million people crowded into the squalor of the other half, where Hamas is in control.
But in this devastated and murky landscape – said current and former Israeli officials, two militia leaders and Israeli and Palestinian analysts – Israel was seeking to repeat a tactic it has used for decades: arming and nurturing militias in enemy territory.
In Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, the Mossad helped arm Kurdish separatists. In Syria, the Israeli military has helped the Druze minority create a de facto buffer zone along the border.
But most infamously, it propped up Christian militias in Lebanon for nearly two decades, only to be forced to retreat and evacuate their proxies in 2000.
That this tactic failed in Lebanon has not stopped Israel from trying again, said Gonen Itzhak, a former senior officer in Israel’s domestic intelligence directorate Shin Bet, who recruited Palestinian informants and collaborators in the occupied West Bank.
“This is how Israel was dragged into the Lebanese quicksand, and this is how we will now be dragged into the Gaza quicksand,” he said. “If we as Israelis think that we can arm a few factions in Gaza and that in the end this ammunition or whatever or military knowledge would not be used against Israel, we are being really, really stupid.”
In Gaza, Israeli bombardment during the war forced Hamas underground, ceding turf to criminal gangs, rival Islamist militias and even escapees from Hamas prisons. This was fertile recruitment territory for Israeli military intelligence’s Unit 504, which has long been tasked with recruiting Arab informants, according to two people familiar with the situation.
It was Unit 504, alongside the Shin Bet, that had helped divide Beirut into duelling sectors after Israel’s 1982 invasion, pitting Christian militias against Palestinian militants and Syrian intelligence, and also helping create an Israeli proxy, the South Lebanon Army.
[ Israel confirms it is arming 'clans' in Gaza to combat HamasOpens in new window ]
After Hamas’s October 7th, 2023, cross-border attacks triggered the war in Gaza, the unit’s fluent Arabic speakers were deployed alongside combat troops to interrogate captured Palestinians, said one person familiar with its operations.
But an Israeli official briefed on the plans said the mission handed to the military’s intelligence directorate soon became broader: seed chaos in Gaza by recruiting, even at times arming, rivals in areas where Hamas was in retreat.
Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu publicly acknowledged the covert policy this year, saying he had authorised “activating clans in Gaza that oppose Hamas”.
There was little hope the mission would produce a rival to equal Hamas, a broad political and military movement – seen by Palestinians as a resistance force against Israeli occupation – with tens of thousands of fighters and a vast subterranean tunnel network.
“There was still an opportunity – the enemy of Hamas can be your friend,” said Igal Shiri, who has studied the recent rise of Gaza’s militias for the Meir Amit Intelligence Center. “Not everyone needs to make a deal with Israel – but Israel got an opportunity to hurt its enemy.”
Amjad Iraqi, the International Crisis Group’s senior analyst for Israel/Palestine, said: “It’s a complex, tricky picture. There are some groups that are known to be collaborating with the Israelis, and some which are criminal gangs or clans who are trying to establish a stronger status and power for themselves in the future of Gaza.”
Unit 504 and the Shin Bet appear to have propped up a clutch of militias – of varying strength – now nearly all concentrated in the Yellow Zone, according to former and current Israeli intelligence officials.
These range from the Popular Forces, a militia run by Yasser Abu Shabab that controls a patch of land near the Rafah border crossing with Egypt, to Astal’s smaller Counter-Terrorism Strike Force, which operates near Khan Younis, once a Hamas stronghold.
How they operate remains murky. Astal claimed to have a relationship with an Israeli security co-ordinator similar to the sort that Palestinian security officials in the West Bank have had for decades with their Israeli counterparts.
“I speak with the army directly – we have a co-ordinator – to bring food in, and if we want to bring in 50 people or 100,” he said.
Astal, a former official with the secular nationalist faction Fatah, fled Gaza when Hamas took over the enclave in a 2007 coup, after which hundreds of Fatah officials were transported by the Israeli military to the West Bank.
Following his return to Gaza years later, Astal said he was imprisoned as a collaborator with Israel, only to break out during Israeli bombardment in December 2023 after the war started.
Astal, who blames Hamas for bringing Israel’s destructive might on Gaza, said he decided to launch his militia after an Israeli strike targeting a Hamas operative in the vicinity of the family’s tent killed his daughter earlier this year. The Financial Times could not verify the claim.
Since then, he has been building up a small area of control within a kilometre of an Israeli military position, according to Israeli officials. “They don’t bother us,” he said.
The Israel Defense Forces declined to comment on its relationships with these clans, how it vetted them and whether it plans to disband and evacuate them when its war with Hamas ends.
This fledgling Israeli programme faced – and failed – its first test within hours of the ceasefire brokered by US president Donald Trump last month.
As Hamas burst out of its tunnels, its fighters reasserted their dominance on their side of the Yellow Line with a series of public executions, painting both criminals and captured members of rival militias alike as collaborators.
With no trials and no evidence, it carried out shootings in the main squares of Gaza City. One of Hamas’s bloodiest campaigns of retribution was against members of the large Doghmosh clan, a would-be challenger within Hamas-controlled territory.
The family, which has long-time ties to Hamas rival Fatah, ranges from a criminal element to doctors, professors and even a small Islamist group considered more radical than Hamas.
As Hamas went underground during the war, some members profiteered from stealing aid, reselling it and hoarding weapons bought from deserters, said one Israeli official familiar with the issue.
But after Israel withdrew under the ceasefire from Gaza City, where the clan is based, Hamas killed dozens of Doghmosh members as it hunted for collaborators, claimed Nizar Doghmosh, head of the clan’s family council.
In an interview, Nizar acknowledged that the Israeli military had some contact with a few family members but said the clan had “refused categorically” to collaborate.
“Hamas originally said, ‘We will take those who collaborated with the occupation,’ and we said we had no problem with that,” said Nizar. “But they surprised us with a massive and ferocious attack which extended to all family members.
“Hamas wants to assert that it is able to dominate Gaza.”
Back on the Israeli side of the Yellow Line, another challenge looms for Israel and would-be proxies.
The Trump administration considers the boundary to be temporary, with the Israeli military to withdraw as Hamas disarms and hands security control to an as-yet unformed international stabilisation force.
This will force Israel to decide whether to bring collaborators along with them, as they have done in the past, giving them new identities and homes in cities with large Palestinian populations such as Ramle and Lod.
“It’s a wild guess what Israel will do” when the Yellow Line moves, said Gadi Hitman, who teaches at Ariel University, in a settlement in the occupied West Bank. “Israel will do its utmost effort to save those who helped her – we don’t use our colleagues and throw them away.
“But to guarantee that we will manage to rescue all of them? Nobody can.” – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2025
