‘Israel’ has long used undercover forces posing as Palestinians to sow strife. Today, it is using this strategy again in Gaza in the form of the gangs taking control over humanitarian aid. The goal is to fragment and dismember Palestinian society.
In the long and bitter history of Palestine’s confrontation with Zionism, few figures have produced such a deep epistemic and affective rupture as the unit of undercover special forces that pose as Palestinians. Known as the “Arabized unit,” or the “musta’ribeen,” the undercover ‘Israeli’ agent, operates not as a visible settler but as a native double. Fluent in Palestinian dialect and mannerisms, the Arabized agent moves among Palestinians as a ghostly presence that mimics and surveils from within while also conducting surprise operations meant to catch the “prey” off guard, either for arrest or assassination. He does not merely collect data; he unsettles community trust and the possibility of collective self-recognition. In this way, the musta’ribeen are not just a tactical force, but a weaponized mode of infiltration that shatters the mirror through which Palestinians see themselves.
‘Israel’ first developed these “Arab” units to carry out rapid operations within Palestinian camps, dense urban spaces that are otherwise inaccessible to uniformed soldiers, with hardly any chance of catching their targets off guard. The musta’rib was an answer to the question of how to reach the “target” before they were aware of the army’s presence.
This logic of infiltration, long a part of Israel’s colonial strategy, has reemerged in the present moment. In a recent video from Hamas’s Qassam Brigades, a Palestinian unit working with the ‘Israeli’ military was designated by the resistance as musta’ribeen. In using that term to designate Palestinian collaborators – which would typically be referred to as collaborators or spies, jawasees – rather than undercover Israelis, Hamas was deliberately destabilizing the boundary between collaborator and enemy.
One of the most infamous figures among these newly anointed Israeli proxies in Rafah is Yasser Abu Shabab, a former prisoner once sentenced for drug smuggling by the Hamas government, who has headed a group of hundreds of armed men looting aid convoys in Gaza throughout the war. His ascent exemplifies how the interplay of clan loyalties, material survival, opportunism, and tacit support from elements within the Palestinian Authority coalesces to open the space for such gangs to emerge. Their presence seeks not only to fracture the social fabric but to suture a new wound atop the open wound of genocide.
‘Israel’s’ use of these collaborator units serves various goals.
First, they serve to obstruct and reroute the flow of humanitarian aid, transforming relief into a mechanism of control.
Second, they act as informal tax collectors, extracting rents from the very economy of suffering they help sustain, thereby positioning themselves as intermediaries — not only with the occupying force, but with the increasingly privatized apparatus of international relief.
Third, they are also used as a mechanism of embezzlement, exploiting desperation to lure Gaza’s hungry and its youth. This power emerges from what they are permitted to offer: a bag of food, a promise of access, a possible exclusion from massacres. These offerings are not benign; they function as levers of control, operating within the tension between the survival of the individual family and the collective endurance (sumud) of the entire community. By inserting themselves as brokers between ‘Israel’ and the population, they allow informal and formal networks of dependency, and authority to fester and grow. They become a native address that mediates with ‘Israel’.
Fourth, and perhaps most insidiously, they function as protagonists in a choreography of propaganda. Carefully staged videos — men in uniform unloading sacks of flour or gesturing at queues of the displaced — are circulated to suggest the emergence of alternative Palestinian governance, one ostensibly more “pragmatic” or pliant, and more willing to sing Netanyahu’s song.
Their role is not merely to sow chaos, but to gesture toward the possibility of another order. Their very presence foments distrust, interrupting the fragile solidarities that form under siege. They are, in a sense, the first to take the bait: the first to imagine a future nested within the apparatus of extermination. But what they are offered is not life, only its mimicry — a managed survivability within a landscape engineered to extinguish Palestinians’ presence — and to extinguish the need for them as well.
And like many such collaborationist phenomena, they disguise their brute turn against their people with mantras such as “popular forces,” the same title Abu Shabab uses to style his band of looters.
But here’s the catch: while these groups may be tactically useful to Israel — convenient for rerouting aid, disciplining hunger, and unsettling the already frayed cohesion of Gaza’s social fabric — their utility remains fundamentally limited. They are not strategic actors in any transformative sense. Their geography is narrow, their influence parasitic, and their existence tethered entirely to the protective shadow of ‘Israeli’ power. They are collaborators. They live, quite literally, off the war: off the aid convoys they loot, off the weapons selectively handed down to them — and off the ‘Israeli’ military’s indulgence.
But what matters most to ‘Israel’ is not their success, but their spectacle. The point is not that they will win Gaza — no one, including their handlers, imagines that they might — but that they serve as a living performance of infiltration. They become symbols of fracture, carrying with them the suggestion that Palestinian society in Gaza is penetrable, divisible, and corruptible. It shows that resistance has its counter-image.
Their real function is not to govern, but to haunt the boundary between opposition and collaboration. They circulate doubt to render the very idea of a collective will to endure suspect. In this sense, the collaborator militia is less a military asset than a narrative device — an actor in Israel’s ongoing effort to narrate Palestinian disintegration as endogenous, inevitable, and perhaps, in Zionist eyes, also “deserved.”
However, their expunged social standing — their exclusion from the communal imaginary — marks their failure to be naturalized into the Palestinian social body, unlike traditional mafias that often root themselves in kinship, neighborhood, or class solidarities. Instead, these collaborators exist in a zone of negative sovereignty: feared, but not respected, known, but not claimed, present, but disavowed. They are best understood as a colonial technology of fragmentation.
This technology of fragmentation is, again, not novel. ‘Israel’ has long cultivated alliances with local actors to manage and disrupt Palestinian cohesion. The convergence of tacit Israeli backing, particularly from intelligence apparatuses, as well as the deliberate failure of policing and broader economic shifts, has produced new, more embedded structures of organized crime.
These groups are not mere byproducts of social decay; they are symptoms of a managed disorder, cultivated and tolerated insofar as they displace collective agency and re-channel violence inward even among those ‘Israel’ touts as its own citizens, and employs them happily as propaganda tools to say, “look, we have Arabs who walk the beach. Therefore, we are not racist.”
The same applies to the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, which today represents the most advanced form of such a gang-like political culture. Cannibalizing the para-state apparatus, the PA governs not only through ‘Israel’s’ shadow but also through its own weaponization of nationalist history. It redraws the boundaries of loyalty and treason, of friend and enemy, in ways that permit it to conceal its dispositions.
But perhaps this is what is most central in the context of Gaza: like humanitarianism and the obscene genocide, like the ‘Israeli’ soldier’s delight and his festivity in the killing of Palestinians and the destruction of their homes — everything is now laid bare. It is a war without coverings. No sheets, no veils, no ideological blinders. The social form of this collaboration, its crude emergence into public visibility, reveals something fundamental about the nature of this war.
It is not only genocidal — it is obscene and shameless, demanding nothing of the world but passivity. What we are witnessing is not merely a military campaign, but a theater of collapse — not of Gaza, but of the ideological blinders, discourses, and moral claims of a world no longer capable of justifying itself.