Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu admitted that Israel is supporting an armed group in conflict-hit Gaza Strip that opposes the resistance movement Hamas, following comments by a former minister that Israel had transferred weapons to it.
Israeli and Palestinian media have reported that the group Israel has been working with is part of a local Bedouin tribe led by Yasser Abu Shabab.
The European Council on Foreign Relations (EFCR) think tank describes Abu Shabab as the leader of a "criminal gang operating in the Rafah area that is widely accused of looting aid trucks".
Knesset member and ex-defence minister Avigdor Liberman had told the Kan public broadcaster that the government, at Netanyahu's direction, was "giving weapons to a group of criminals and felons".
"What did Liberman leak? That security sources activated a clan in Gaza that opposes Hamas? What is bad about that?" Netanyahu said in a video posted to social media on Thursday.
"It is only good, it is saving lives of Israeli soldiers."
Michael Milshtein, an expert on Palestinian affairs at the Moshe Dayan Center in Tel Aviv, told AFP that the Abu Shabab clan was part of a Bedouin tribe that spans across the border between Gaza and Egypt's Sinai peninsula.
Some of the tribe's members, he said, were involved in "all kinds of criminal activities, drug smuggling, and things like that".
Army spokesman Brigadier General Effie Defrin on Friday confirmed the military supported arming criminal gangs in Gaza but remained tight-lipped on the details.
"I can say that we are operating in various ways against Hamas governance," Defrin said during a televised press conference when questioned on the subject, without elaborating further.
Milshtein said that Abu Shabab had spent time in prison in Gaza and that his clan chiefs had recently denounced him as an Israeli "collaborator and a gangster".
"It seems that actually the Shabak (Israeli security agency) or the (military) thought it was a wonderful idea to turn this gang actually, into a proxy, to give them weapons and money and shelter" from army operations, Milshtein said.
He added that Hamas killed four members of the gang days ago.
The ECFR said Abu Shabab was "reported to have been previously jailed by Hamas for drug smuggling. His brother is said to have been killed by Hamas during a crackdown against the group's attacks on UN aid convoys."
Israel regularly accuses Hamas, with which it has been at war for nearly 20 months, of looting aid convoys in Gaza.
Hamas said the group had "chosen betrayal and theft as their path" and called on civilians to oppose them.
Hamas, which has ruled Gaza for nearly two decades, said it had evidence of "clear coordination between these looting gangs, collaborators with the occupation (Israel), and the enemy army itself in the looting of aid and the fabrication of humanitarian crises that deepen the suffering of" Palestinians.
Milshtein called Israel's decision to arm a group such as Abu Shabab "a fantasy, not something that you can really describe as a strategy".
"I really hope it will not end with catastrophe," he said.
