Hamas had no comment, its Gaza spokesperson said, while Israeli authorities did not immediately make any comment.<\/p>\n
![\"Ghassan](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/skynews-dxf-nabahin-shabab_7038363.jpg\")
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Image:
\n Ghassan Al Duhine, left, was the deputy commander of the Popular Forces’ military wing. Pic: Facebook<\/p>\n
Hamas has accused Abu Shabab of collaborating with Israel, which he denied.<\/p>\n
Sky News revealed<\/a> that Abu Shabab’s Bedouin militia was smuggling vehicles into Gaza with the help of the Israeli military and an Arab-Israeli car dealer.<\/p>\n Popular Forces has been positioning itself as Gaza’s future government, despite denials in June that Abu Shabab had any intention of forming a government in Gaza.<\/p>\n The militia said at the time that he was focused solely on providing security to aid convoys and Palestinians.<\/p>\n Speaking to Sky News, however, Hassan Abu Shabab, a relative and childhood friend of Yasser Abu Shabab, showed no such restraint – he talked of reforming the school curriculum and holding a referendum on normalising relations with Israel.<\/p>\n “We’d like to run everything,” he said.<\/p>\n Image: Looting trucks and smuggling cigarettes<\/p>\n He said in October that the recruitment of new militias had swelled Popular Forces’ troops across Gaza to around 3,000.<\/p>\n The headquarters of the militia are located in a small neighbourhood in Gaza’s southern Rafah area, in territory still held by Israeli forces.<\/p>\n The base’s location is strategically important – it sits along the route by which aid trucks must travel when entering Gaza through the Kerem Shalom crossing, a route that aid officials have named “Looters’ Alley”.<\/p>\n An internal UN report, dated November 2024, identified Abu Shabab and his gang as “the most influential stakeholders behind the systematic and massive looting of convoys”.<\/p>\n Datawrapper<\/p>\n This content is provided by Datawrapper, which may be using cookies and other technologies. Unfortunately we have been unable to verify if you have consented to Datawrapper cookies. Enable Cookies<\/a> The UN document identified their primary source of income as smuggling cigarettes – one of the many goods which Israel has officially banned from entering Gaza. The price of individual cigarettes has at some points reached $20.<\/p>\n Hassan Abu Shabab admitted that the group was involved in looting trucks and smuggling cigarettes, though he said they only ever targeted commercial trucks they believed to be supplying Hamas.<\/p>\n Read more: He said it eventually escalated, with Hamas’s men allegedly killing his cousins in a “massacre” that left 54 people dead.<\/p>\n Sky News could not independently verify his claim, but there were numerous reports of deadly clashes between Abu Shabab’s men and Hamas, which declared the Popular Forces leader a wanted man.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A Palestinian anti-Hamas militia leader has been killed in the Gaza Strip, according to Israeli army radio. Yasser…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":174866,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":{"0":"post-174865","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-top-news","11":"tag-top-stories","12":"tag-topnews","13":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/174865","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=174865"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/174865\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/174866"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=174865"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=174865"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=174865"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Yasser](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/skynews-abushabab-dxf-rafah_7038467.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
\n Yasser Abu Shabab (right), in a photo uploaded to his social media account. Pic: TikTok<\/p>\n
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Investigation reveals Israel’s support for militia<\/a>
Hamas battles militias for control of Gaza<\/a>
Revealed: The four militias backing Israel<\/a><\/p>\n