For the first time in five years, the armed Islamist movement Hamas, in power in the Gaza Strip, executed five Palestinians on Sunday, two of them for “collaboration” with Israel.
“This Sunday morning, the death penalty sentence was carried out against two convicted of collaborating with the occupation (Israel) and another three for criminal proceedings,” Hamas announced in a statement, in which it assured that the five “previously had full right to defend oneself” before the local courts.
The Interior Ministry of the Gaza Strip, a Palestinian territory of 2.3 million people under Hamas control since 2007, revealed the year of birth and other details of each case, but not the identity of those executed.
The two convicted of “collaboration” with Israel are two men born in 1968 and 1978. The older of the two is a resident of Khan Younis (south) who was “hanged”. He was convicted by the local courts for providing Israel, since 1991, with “information about members of the resistance, their places of residence” and “the location of rocket manufacturing and launch sites,” Hamas said.
The second was “shot” for providing information to Israel since 2001 that led to the “attack and martyrdom of citizens” by Israeli forces, Hamas added.
The other three people executed had previous convictions for murder, the Hamas Interior Ministry said in a statement.
The Palestinian Center for Human Rights in Gaza declared these executions “a violation of international obligations” and urged the Gaza authorities to stop “using the death penalty” and replace it with a “life sentence”.
Omar Shakir, director for Israel and Palestinian territories at Human Rights Watch, called the executions “hateful.”
“The death penalty issued by a government is a barbaric practice that has no place in the modern world,” he said on Twitter.
In recent years, the authorities in Gaza have sentenced several people to death for various crimes or for “collaboration” with the State of Israel, although these death sentences have not been carried out.
The last known executions date back to 2017. Three Palestinians -Ashraf Abu Leila, Hisham al Alul and Abdallah al Nashar- were publicly executed after being sentenced in a quick trial before the local military justice, for having participated in the murder of a Hamas commander, Mazen Faqha, “of Israel”.
As this Sunday in the case of the two executed for “collaboration” with Israel, Hamas justified the 2017 executions under the revolutionary code of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).
Hamas, however, is not part of the PLO, whose revolutionary code is outdated on the issue of capital punishment in relation to the Palestinian Basic Law of 2003.
The Palestinian Authority, led by Mahmud Abas, also acceded in 2019 to the UN treaty that seeks to abolish the death penalty.
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