The killing on Thursday of Yasser Abu Shabab, a Gazan militia leader backed by Israel, underscored what analysts had long warned: that Palestinians handpicked by Israel to undermine Hamas would most likely meet a violent end.
Mr. Abu Shabab’s group, the Popular Forces, was the strongest of several Gaza militias Israel had worked with to combat Hamas. Israeli officials said they had even helped arm Mr. Abu Shabab’s militia, though he denied that.
Many Palestinians condemned Mr. Abu Shabab as a traitor, and some Israelis were equally skeptical of his intentions and capabilities. But in a rare interview in late October, he told The New York Times that he was unabashed about his ties with Israel.
“There’s coordination on the level of security, and on the operations around us,” he said, and added, “These aim to prevent any terrorist from infiltrating us,” referring to Hamas.
On Thursday, the militia leader was killed during clashes involving a Palestinian clan in southern Gaza, his group said on social media.
Hamas did not immediately appear to have been involved in the killing of Mr. Abu Shabab, who was based near the city of Rafah in an area controlled by the Israeli military. But Gaza’s Hamas-run interior ministry celebrated his death in a statement on Friday, saying it was “the inevitable fate of every traitor,” and urged the remaining members of Palestinian militias close to Israel to hand themselves in, “before it is too late.”
Whether the Popular Forces will outlast his death is unclear.
The militant group shared a video showing that Mr. Abu Shabab’s deputy, Ghassan Duhine, had assumed the leadership of the group. Mr. Duhine, whose affiliations before joining the Popular Forces were unclear, could been seen walking in front of gunmen chanting that their spirits remained high.
Since the early days of the war, Israel has cast about for potential Gazan allies who might help erode Hamas’s control. To that end, it has propped up at least four small bands of Palestinian gunmen, the groups’ commanders said in interviews.
Israel and Hamas agreed to a cease-fire in mid-October, ending more than two years of war in Gaza, but they have yet to settle the question of who will control the Palestinian enclave. For now, each side controls roughly half of Gaza’s territory.
A vast majority of Gaza’s two million people live in the Hamas-dominated zone along the coast. The anti-Hamas Palestinian militias have mostly operated in the Israeli-controlled part.
Analysts considered the Popular Forces to be the largest and best organized of those groups. Mr. Abu Shabab said in October that the area he controlled hosted some 3,000 people, fewer than half of whom were fighters. The other commanders, who include Ashraf al-Mansi in northern Gaza and Housam al-Astal east of the southern city of Khan Younis, said in interviews that they hosted a couple hundred people each in their areas.
Though the Popular Forces was militarily outnumbered by Hamas, it said it had skirmished with Hamas fighters, even saying in late November that it had taken at least one prisoner.
The small militias helped secure parts of Gaza on behalf of the Israeli military, freeing up Israeli troops for other missions, said Shalom Ben Hanan, a retired senior official in Israel’s domestic intelligence agency, Shin Bet.
“They carry out military missions as though they were a military unit,” Mr. Ben Hanan said. “If they weren’t around to do them, our own forces would have to.”
But for most Palestinians, Mr. Abu Shabab’s checkered past and ties with Israel made him an unacceptable candidate for any future leadership role in Gaza.
A Bedouin from southeastern Rafah, Mr. Abu Shabab rose to notoriety in late 2024, when he was accused of raiding scores of aid convoys during a particularly severe hunger crisis at the height of the war.
Mr. Abu Shabab and his gunmen dominated an area close to Gaza’s Kerem Shalom crossing on the border with Israel. In an interview at the time, he conceded that his Kalashnikov-wielding gang had looted a handful of trucks, although he said he had seized the goods only to feed himself, his family and neighbors.
Georgios Petropoulos, a senior U.N. official who was based in Gaza at the time, called him “the self-styled power broker of east Rafah.” Mr. Petropoulos, as well as other U.N. workers trying to get aid into Gaza, accused Israel of ignoring Mr. Abu Shabab’s attacks on aid.
The repeated ransacking drew the ire of Hamas, and at least 20 members of Mr. Abu Shabab’s organization, including his brother, were killed in a shootout with Hamas fighters late last year.
Earlier this year, Mr. Abu Shabab began touting himself as a Palestinian leader on social media, calling his band of gunmen an anti-Hamas “counterterrorism force.” He released footage that appeared to show that, in the corner of Rafah that he ruled, the group provided tents and schools for people sheltering there.
While many Palestinians in Gaza went hungry as Israeli restricted supplies from entering the enclave, Mr. Abu Shabab said in the October interview that his area was relatively well provisioned.
Israel and his forces, aided by Israeli aerial surveillance, he said, worked together to prevent any Hamas fighters from entering their area. He said he also provided the names of his fighters and their families to the Israeli military as part of coordination with Israel.
Despite Israel’s support, neither Mr. Abu Shabab’s group nor the other ragtag bands of gunmen were likely to pose a significant threat to Hamas, said Mr. Ben Hanan, the former Shin Bet officer. There were far too few of them, he argued, and their association with Israel had tainted them in the minds of most Palestinians.
“They will always be considered traitors and collaborators,” Mr. Ben Hanan said. “No one will want to get close to them.”
Many Gazans view the militias as little better than gangs who exploited the chaos of war to accumulate power.
Montaser Bahja, an English teacher in Gaza City, said Palestinians needed new leadership and to engage with Israel if necessary in order to reach a better future. But it could not come from people like Mr. Abu Shabab, he said.
“This man was basically a criminal, and I could not accept for him to represent me,” Mr. Bahja said.
Mr. Abu Shabab said before his death that he hoped to shape a future Gaza without Hamas, but beyond that it was not clear what he stood for. He dismissed accusations that he was a traitor for working with Israel, though he conceded that some Palestinians considered his actions “disreputable.”
He said that if they “had will and courage, they would have been like Yasser Abu Shabab.”
Aaron Boxerman is a Times reporter covering Israel and Gaza. He is based in Jerusalem.
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