A Hamas Rival Falls in Gaza - WSJ Editorial
The leader of the most prominent anti-Hamas militia in Gaza was killed on Thursday. Yasser Abu Shabab, commander of the Popular Forces, contributed an op-ed to these pages in July: “Gazans Are Finished With Hamas.” If only Hamas were finished with Gazans.
Abu Shabab, a Tarabin Bedouin, apparently was killed in a clash with a rival family, not Hamas, but the terrorists have retaken the western half of Gaza from which Israel withdrew in October. In the early days of the cease-fire, Hamas carried out a wave of public executions of Palestinians whose clans it considered rivals.
Those killings, and the torture and extortion that continue, are designed to neutralize alternatives to Hamas rule. Hamas did the same to Fatah earlier this century. Fatah in turn had purged pro-Jordanian Palestinian leaders, and even earlier the father of Palestinian nationalism, Amin al-Husseini, had his moderate Nashashibi rivals assassinated. The contemporary national movement is the result of generations of purges of anyone who would end the Palestinian forever war against Israel.
For Hamas as for its predecessors, it’s working. Two months into the cease-fire, not a single Hamas terrorist has disarmed, an obvious breach of the agreement. Nor has any International Stabilization Force deployed. Arab and Muslim states see the reality on the ground. They signed up for peacekeeping, as King Abdullah of Jordan told the BBC in late October. “If it’s ‘peace enforcing,’ nobody will want to touch that,” he said. The job has been left vacant. In its absence, Hamas on Wednesday wounded five Israeli troops, and the Israel Defense Forces carried out an air strike in response, reportedly killing five. The IDF also killed the commander of Hamas’s eastern Rafah battalion on Sunday when he emerged from a tunnel in the area, where Abu Shabab’s Popular Forces operates.
This low-level fighting isn’t war, but it sure isn’t peace. The new, harmonious Gaza that President Trump outlined in late September has unsurprisingly proved elusive. So long as Hamas rules territory, peace is mere talk. There’s only the countdown to the next war, which again will likely fail to destroy Israel but bring ruin to Palestinians. Any Palestinian who tries to change that usually ends up dead.
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