Mouin Rabbani from the Center For Conflict & Humanitarian Studies talks about the violence in Gaza since the ceasefire began and how he believes it’s being fuelled by Israel.
Published On 19 Oct 202519 Oct 2025
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In June, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu admitted to arming and supporting the Popular Forces militia in Gaza to oppose Hamas.
“What’s wrong with this?” he said in a short video he tweeted. “It only saves the lives of Israeli soldiers.”
He did not clarify what the Popular Forces would do exactly, but experts believe Israel is backing the militia and its leader, Yasser Abu Shabab, to put a Palestinian face on the ethnic cleansing of Gaza.
The 31-year-old Abu Shabab, a previously unknown member of Gaza’s Tarabin Bedouin tribe, escaped prison around October 7, having been imprisoned since 2015 for drug-related charges.
Drugs are reportedly smuggled into Gaza through Egypt’s Sinai and, according to analysts, are run by ISIL-affiliated groups. This has led to a widespread belief that Abu Shabab has ISIL (ISIS) links.
But Abu Shabab’s alleged affiliation with ISIL has not been an issue for Israel; analysts say it is using him to advance its ethnic cleansing plans in Gaza.
Abu Shabab, who leads the 100-man-strong Popular Forces militia, is an elementary school dropout, according to Muhammad Shehada, a visiting fellow with the European Council on Foreign Relations.
Despite this, he has a sophisticated and multilingual social media presence, and he recently penned an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal claiming that Palestinians in Gaza were done with Hamas.
Analysts believe his refined media presence is likely honed outside Gaza.
“He’s not been in touch with society for the last decade,” Shehada said. “He’s a nobody. He’s basically a front guy.”
His own tribe, the Tarabin, does not approve of his role in Gaza today, making a rare public statement disavowing him for allegedly collaborating with Israel.
Abu Shabab began to rise to prominence in late May 2024 after Israel invaded Rafah, in southern Gaza.
“His gang emerges a month later and becomes the main gang that loots the overwhelming majority of food and aid that’s going into Gaza systematically under [Israeli military] protection,” Shehada said.
About nine out of 10 trucks entering Gaza have been looted, according to United Nations statistics. Israel initially blamed Hamas for the looting, but humanitarian groups refuted that claim, and even the Israeli military was unable to find any proof that that was the case.
Instead, international aid workers say it was Abu Shabab who was systematically looting the aid.
An internal UN memo obtained by the Washington Post specifically named Abu Shabab “the main and most influential stakeholder behind systematic and massive looting” in Gaza.
During the brief ceasefire that Israel unilaterally broke in March, Abu Shabab disappeared, only to reappear in mid-May when Israel, under immense international pressure, started to allow a trickle of aid back into Gaza.
“Literally on that day, he emerges again out of nowhere,” Shehada said.
“He’s been the face of Israel’s hunger campaign,” Shehada said, “while giving Israel full deniability of it and outsourcing the thing.”
Beyond the stealing of aid meant for starving Palestinians, analysts said Abu Shabab and his militia are contributing to a wider Israeli plan to ethnically cleanse Gaza, which has been intensifying this year.
“Israel is in the process of trying to build up the militias associated with Abu Shabab in hopes that they can expand the concentration camp zones over which those militias can operate/control so that Israel can reduce the burden of occupation while facilitating the ethnic cleansing,” Tariq Kenney Shawa, the US policy fellow at Al-Shabaka, a Palestinian policy network, told Al Jazeera.
In early July, Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz announced a plan to push 600,000 Palestinians into tent cities in southern Gaza and called it “voluntary migration”. When Katz revealed the plan, it was widely panned by the Israeli media and humanitarians.
Abu Shabab’s militia has been building what analysts are calling concentration camps in southern Gaza, in an effort to drive more than half a million Palestinians there before being displaced to third countries.
“The intention is to hold them there until an opportunity arises to send them elsewhere outside of Gaza, be that Egypt or any number of third countries,” Omar Rahman, a fellow at the Middle East Council on Global Affairs, said.
Forcing Palestinians into an unbearably small area and then forcing them over the border into Egypt could spark serious international repercussions, as the Egyptians have rejected displacing Palestinians.
“Israel understands that if the [Israeli army] operates a concentration camp in Rafah, it wouldn’t look very nice,” Shehada told Al Jazeera, adding that Israel would prefer “a Palestinian face that’s dressed in Palestinian uniforms with a Palestinian flag and speaking in Arabic” as the face of such an operation.
In addition, he said, Abu Shabab has “two very well-oiled Facebook propaganda machineries” that could convince desperate people to seek shelter in his camps, “especially if Israel [begins] forcefully pushing people there.”
“Abu Shabab’s militia is running smaller concentration camps within areas Israel controls and has advertised them as ‘safe havens’ for people to come get aid and set up tents and such,” Kenney Shawa said.
This process has been bolstered by the US and Israel-backed GHF, which Israel is trying to impose as the sole distributor of aid in Gaza.
But the GHF has been widely lambasted by aid groups and the UN for politicising aid, and Israeli soldiers shoot at hungry Palestinians every day as they try to secure aid for their families. More than 1,000 Palestinians have been killed at the GHF’s distribution centres since May.
Worsening the situation is that, instead of some 400 aid distribution points that the UNRWA used to operate in Gaza, the GHF has only four sites in the whole Gaza Strip.
Tellingly, three of those are in the south, with only one in central Gaza, leading analysts to believe the sites were selected intentionally by Israeli authorities.
“Survival depends on food access,” Rahman said. “The entire purpose of GHF is to force the population to relocate.”
Army aircraft were reportedly hovering above as the killings took place, showing command control of the operation.
At least 130 civilians belonging to the Fulani ethnic group were killed by Burkina Faso’s army and allied militias near the western town of Solenzo in March, Human Rights Watch (HRW) has said.
The killings took place amid a major weeks-long military campaign by special forces that resulted in “widespread civilian deaths and massive displacement” of the Fulani pastoralist community in the region, the rights group said in a report on Monday.
It added that an Al-Qaeda-affiliated group called the Jamaat Nusrat al-Islam wa al-Muslimin (JNIM) then carried out a series of retaliatory attacks, hitting villages that the armed group perceived as having assisted the military.
Ilaria Allegrozzi, senior Sahel researcher at HRW, said in a statement the “the viral videos of the atrocities by pro-government militias near Solenzo” that cirinitially circulated “told only part of the story”.
“Further research uncovered that Burkina Faso’s military was responsible for these mass killings of Fulani civilians, which were followed by deadly reprisals by an Islamist armed group,” Allegrozzi added.
“The government needs to impartially investigate these deaths and prosecute all those responsible.”
HRW had reported in March that the government’s involvement was likely due to video evidence online.
At that time, the government strongly denied the allegations, saying in a statement it “condemned the propagation, on social media, of images inducing hate and community violence, and fake information aimed at undermining social cohesion” in the West African country.
Burkina Faso’s government and army did not immediately react to Monday’s report, which alleged that the Burkinabe army “led and participated in the massacre of more than 130, possibly many more, ethnic Fulani civilians by pro-government militias”.
The rights organisation’s report is based on interviews with witnesses to the attacks, militia members, journalists and civil society members.
Witnesses quoted by HRW said hundreds of government troops and drones, as well as a pro-government militia called the Volunteers for the Defense of the Homeland (VDP), were involved in attacks on Solenzo and other towns in the western Boucle du Mouhoun region.
The witnesses said most of the victims in Banwa province were women, children and older people.
Military helicopters and drones surveilled the area, “indicating direct command control of the operation”, HRW said.
A 44-year-old Fulani herder, who lost eight family members, told HRW that thousands of families from more than 20 villages were forced to flee to neighbouring Mali in search of protection.
“However, we couldn’t reach Mali without crossing villages [that were] occupied by the VDPs and the army. The VDPs shot at us like animals, while drones were flying over our heads. Many women and children died because they could not run,” he said.
Military rulers took power in Burkina Faso in 2022, but they have largely failed to provide the stability promised, as more than 60 percent of the country is estimated to be outside government control.
The military has also turned to mass recruitment of civilians who are deployed in poorly trained militia units, leading to worsening tensions between ethnic groups.
April 25 (UPI) — The Department of Justice said Friday that a federal grand jury returned an indictment Thursday against a Maryland man on charges of conspiring to support armed separatist militias in Cameroon.
Cameroon national and Maryland resident Eric Tataw surrendered to custody and was scheduled to make his first court appearance Friday.
According to Matthew R. Galeotti, head of the DOJ’s Criminal Division, “The defendant is alleged to have ordered horrific acts of violence, including severing limbs, against Cameroonian civilians in support of a violent secessionist movement.”
The DOJ said in a statement that the violent armed groups are fighting to form a new nation called “Ambazonia” in the northwest and southwest regions of Cameroon.
U.S. Attorney Kelly O. Hayes for the District of Maryland said in a statement, “Tataw and his co-conspirators masterminded and financially supported a vicious scheme to overthrow a foreign government. They resorted to an unthinkable level of violence while instilling fear in innocent victims to advance their political agenda.”
The militia are known as “Amba Boys.”
Prosecutors allege that Tataw and others “sought to raise funds for the Amba Boys to finance violent attacks in Cameroon.”
They say Tataw allegedly also called “for the murder, kidnapping, and maiming of civilians and the destruction of public, educational, and cultural property in Cameroon.”
Prosecutors further allege Tataw directed maiming torture of Cameroon civilians by severing limbs. Tataw allegedly referred to himself as “Garri Master,” or master of mutilation.
Tataw faces up to 15 years in prison for conspiracy to provide material support to the militias and five years on each of four counts “of interstate communication of a threat to harm.”