Hamas at work

I believe that Hamas killed more Gazan Arabs than Israel did on Friday. You may have read that Hamas summarily executed 18 Palestinians on Friday, as in this YnetNews report. The YnetNews report combines Reuters, AFP, and AP reports with its own reportage and includes chilling photographs such as the one below that you may not have seen elsewhere, even if you caught up with an article on the killings. Reuters has posted a slideshow here. The 18 were killed for suspected collaboration with Israel following Israel’s pinpoint strike on three Hamas commanders on Thursday.

HamasAtWork

The Chicago Tribune report on the executions drily observes that “[t]wo bodies were seen being loaded onto an ambulance before Reuters journalists were told to leave the area [of the police station near Gaza City where executions took place].” Removal of the bodies was apparently not intended for public consumption.

The Chicago Tribune report (I assume from Reuters) adds this quote from Al-Majd, a website run by Hamas’s internal security service: “The resistance has begun an operation called ‘strangling the necks’, targeting collaborators who aid the (Israeli) occupation, kill our people and destroy houses.” (The parenthetical helpfully clarifies that it’s the Israeli “occupation” of Israel that is at issue.)

The Tribune also takes note of a so-called conviction letter signed by the “Palestinian Resistance” posted on a wall near where the bodies of the alleged collaborators lay. The notice read:

“They provided the enemy with information about the whereabouts of fighters, tunnels of resistance, bombs, houses of fighters and places of rockets, and the occupation bombarded these areas, killing a number of fighters … Therefore, the ruling of revolutionary justice was handed upon him.”

We haven’t much from the media or anything from the friends of Hamas around the world about its amazingly swift brand of revolutionary justice. I haven’t found any statement by the White House or the Department of State. We therefore turn to the New York Post, which comments on the photographs and observes in an editorial that Hamas and ISIS are “two sides of the same coin.” That’s better than either the White House or the State Department would do in any event.

UPDATE: I see that an execution photo appears at the top center of page one of both the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal this morning.

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