Israel is creating a power vacuum in Gaza by backing armed looters, killing anyone who tries to stop them
Bahjat Abu Sultan, head of Gaza’s Security Service, flanked by police officers on a field visit in Gaza City during the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, 20 January 2025. Sultan was assassinated alongside several Gaza government leaders on 18 March.
Faris Giacaman and Tareq S. Hajjaj report in Mondoweiss on 6 May 2025:
Israel has been waging a war on Gaza’s ability to govern itself and maintain law and order as a part of its 18-month-long genocidal campaign. The broad objective of this strategy has been to create a civil and humanitarian vacuum in Gaza that would lead to chaos and lawlessness. The intended effect, in Israel’s eyes, is either total social collapse, the spread of criminality, or the emergence of an alternative “clan”-based leadership in Gaza instead of Hamas. Israel stands to gain from any of those scenarios.
To make sure this administrative vacuum is maintained, Israel has launched periodic assassination campaigns targeting members of Gaza’s civil government — the police force, the security forces, the Civil Defense, and the healthcare system.
Israel has instrumentalized the fact that all these civil branches of government in Gaza, by definition, fall under Hamas control, given that it is the ruling faction in the strip. Consequently, it labels any Gaza civil servant as a “Hamas operative,” an association that has allowed Israel to legitimize the targeting of an entire category of civilian workers. They have included firefighters, medics, nurses, doctors, first responders, police officers, and other civil servants who were killed in the line of duty.
Over the past several months, Mondoweiss has collected testimonies from officials and field operatives in the Gaza government’s civil branches, documenting Israel’s targeting campaign and its sanctioning of looting and lawlessness to exacerbate famine conditions in Gaza. On one occasion, Mondoweiss was also able to obtain testimony from a young man who joined a group that looted aid convoys in December 2024.