Israeli militias committed war crimes against Gazans, testimony shows
An Israeli officer's testimony on militias sent to commit war crimes in Gaza is documentary evidence, but Ahmed Al-Maghari and his neighbours lived it first.
Ahmed Al-Maghari was at home in the Al-Maghazi refugee camp on 8 April when gunmen loyal to a militia commander called Shawqi Abu Nasira came through the neighbourhood firing into houses. His account forms part of a wider body of Israeli militias war crimes testimony now emerging from Gaza. “We were shocked when Abu Nasira’s forces, or the militia, entered the neighbourhood and began firing at people’s homes and at the children inside those homes,” he said afterwards. At least ten Palestinians were killed and dozens wounded as Israeli airstrikes hit the area while residents shot back at the militia.
Four months later, a serving Israeli Air Force officer has confirmed, in testimony reported by Haaretz on 26 August, why raids like the one Al-Maghari survived keep happening. “You see the State of Israel, the IDF and Shin Bet sending armed, trained militias to commit war crimes,” he told the paper, “and I’m the one who has to protect them during their operations so they don’t get hurt.” It is the first time a serving officer has put that arrangement, in those words, on the record.
NHS whistleblower’s testimony details Israeli militias war crimes The Haaretz investigation, built on soldier testimony, satellite imagery from Planet Labs and sources inside Gaza, describes militiamen operating freely around IDF outposts and arriving at raids in pickup trucks to shoot at people, loot homes and burn them. One Israeli soldier described watching a militia “arbitration” in Khan Yunis in which a gunman who had accidentally shot another man’s wife was punitively shot in the legs, with bystanders treating it as ordinary justice. The Air Force officer worked drone surveillance alongside a Shin Bet operative while militiamen carried out one such raid below.
None of this is deniable as improvisation. The United Nations’ humanitarian coordination office has logged reports of militia forces coordinating with the Israeli military to order Gazans out of their homes, including phone calls from people identifying themselves as Israeli forces. The UN human rights office said in June it was concerned about “Palestinian armed elements in Gaza that appear to be backed by Israeli forces.” A militia commander in Deir al-Balah confirmed as much himself, in a video he posted in May relaying an Israeli order for residents to leave. Asked by Haaretz for its legal position on the militias, the IDF referred the question to Shin Bet. Shin Bet did not reply.
How the militias got their guns
Understanding why an Israeli officer is describing his own command structure this way means going back to how the militias were built. In 2025, with the Netanyahu government refusing to let the Palestinian Authority return to Gaza, Israel began arming clans and factions opposed to Hamas as a governing alternative. Netanyahu confirmed it publicly in June that year, after reporting linked the policy to Yasser Abu Shabab, a man who had escaped a Hamas prison on drug-trafficking charges and built the most prominent of the new militias, the Popular Forces. When Abu Shabab was killed in December, a former Palestinian Authority officer named Ghassan Duhine took over, and the project expanded rather than folded.
By this summer, Haaretz counts five armed groups, possibly six, operating under IDF control across Beit Hanoun, Shujaiyeh, Deir al-Balah, Khan Yunis and Rafah, some numbering in the hundreds. A ceasefire in October 2025 split Gaza roughly in half along what is called the Yellow Line, with the IDF holding the larger share and Hamas the rest, and the militias have carved out their operating zones on the Israeli-controlled side. Senior Israeli military officials told Haaretz, anonymously, that the militia leaders are “not political leaders or a legitimate governing alternative to Hamas” but former gang leaders and drug dealers. Netanyahu’s own account of the policy is blunter than his generals’. Asked about the relationship, he said: “What’s wrong with that? It’s good.”
Grievance, and who is responsible for it
Abu Nasira, the commander whose men attacked Al-Maghari’s neighbourhood, is not a foreign creation with no stake of his own. A former Palestinian Authority lieutenant colonel who spent sixteen years in an Israeli prison, he says his son and daughter were killed and frames his campaign as a personal reckoning with Hamas rather than service to Israel. “I made the decision to liberate the land from Hamas,” he has said. “If people say that makes me a collaborator, then I’m a collaborator.” His own family disowned him publicly. Hamas’s record includes documented war crimes of its own, from 7 October 2023 to its treatment of hostages, and it would be dishonest to pretend every militiaman is simply following a script written in Tel Aviv.
But a grievance against Hamas does not explain the artillery and drone support Haaretz says the IDF supplied during militia operations, and it does not explain why an Israeli officer is assigned to protect these men while they burn houses down. Israel arms these groups, directs elements of their operations, and shields them from the consequences. That is a chain of command, and command carries responsibility, whatever motivates the men at the end of it.
Why the deal that could disarm them collapsed
The militias are also, at this moment, the reason a ceasefire plan is stuck. Donald Trump’s Board of Peace proposal, with Jared Kushner shuttling to Israel and Tony Blair reportedly at the table, links Hamas’s disarmament to the militias’ in its own text: articles 8 and 10 of the plan require both to give up their weapons before Israel completes a withdrawal. Netanyahu rejected the plan on 9 August specifically over that sequencing, insisting Hamas disarm first with no matching demand on the militias his government built. Eight Arab and Muslim states condemned the rejection. Hamas has told Haaretz it will not disarm while armed groups it did not choose remain in the field around it. Kushner was back in Israel on 18 August still pressing for a way through. Until the militia question is resolved, disarmament of anyone in Gaza is not a serious plan, only a slogan.
What happens when Parliament returns
That leaves a British thread worth watching. Fifty-one MPs have signed an Early Day Motion this session over UK arms sales to Israel and the risk they have armed a war-crimes project the Israeli state’s own officers now describe from inside it. Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband is reported to be pushing for wider restrictions, including on trade linked to settlements, ahead of Parliament’s return from recess in September under Andy Burnham’s government. Nothing has been announced. But the officer who says his job is protecting militias sent to commit war crimes has, without meaning to, handed Westminster a plain question to answer when it sits again: whether Britain’s arms licences have helped arm the men who came for Ahmed Al-Maghari’s neighbourhood.
