Hamas, the Islamist armed movement that rules the Gaza Strip, on Sunday executed five Palestinians – two for collaboration with Israel and three for murder. Four of the men were hanged; one was executed by firing squad because he was a policeman, who used his weapon to kill his father-in-law and a 13-year-old girl last July in a family dispute.
“On Sunday morning, the death sentence was carried out against two condemned over collaboration with the occupation [Israel], and three others in criminal cases,” Hamas said in a statement. The defendants, the statement said, had been given “their full rights to defend themselves.”
The Hamas Interior Ministry provided the initials and years of birth of the five, but not their names, according to the French news agency AFP. The men executed for collaboration were born in 1968 and 1978. The older man, a resident of Khan Yunis in the Gaza Strip, was convicted of supplying Israel with “information on men of the resistance, their residence … and the location of rocket launchpads,” Hamas said. The second man was executed for supplying Israel with intelligence “that led to the targeting and martyrdom of citizens.”
The two men accused of spying for Israel were arrested in 2009 and 2015 and “convicted by a court of treason and conspiring with foreign parties,” the Interior Ministry statement said.
Hamas has carried out at least 27 executions since taking control of the Gaza Strip in 2007, some two years after Israel withdrew its military and some 7,000 civilian settlers from the enclave.