GAZA, (PIC)
A report published by the Israeli news outlet Zman Yisrael has shed light on the armed militia project established by Israel in the Gaza Strip, revealing growing criticism within Israeli circles of an initiative promoted as an attempt to create a local alternative to Hamas.
The report, written by journalist Nurit Yohanan, said the project has so far produced limited results on the ground, while concerns are mounting over its future security and political consequences. Continued military and intelligence support According to the report, Israel has provided various forms of support to several armed groups in Gaza, including weapons, intelligence and logistical assistance.
Israel has also transferred wounded members of these groups into Israeli territory for medical treatment.
One such militia, which calls itself the “People’s Army,” recently published footage showing its members using drones, indicating that it has received more advanced military equipment than before. Questions over the project’s viability Although nearly a year has passed since Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu acknowledged that Israel was arming militias inside Gaza, the project’s precise nature and ultimate objectives remain unclear, Yohanan wrote.
The report quoted Israeli researcher Michael Milshtein, head of the Palestinian Studies Forum at Tel Aviv University’s Moshe Dayan Center, as saying that “Gaza has become the capital of Israeli illusions.”
Milshtein said the militia project was another example of those illusions, having failed to achieve tangible results on the ground. Limited influence as Hamas retains control The report said the militias number only a few hundred members, while Hamas continues to retain influence across most populated areas of the Gaza Strip.
Their activities remain confined to limited areas and include occasional clashes with Hamas, as well as attempts to gain popular support by distributing food and humanitarian assistance in some locations. Popular and factional rejection According to the report, these militias are unlikely to help Israel build trust among Gaza’s population.
It noted that Palestinian factions across the political spectrum, including Fatah and Hamas, regard the groups as a rejected phenomenon.
The report also cited Hussam al-Astal, a leader of an Israeli-backed militia operating south of Khan Yunis, who claimed that Gaza residents had become exhausted by the war and wanted only to live.
However, testimonies included in the report indicated widespread public hostility toward the armed groups. Israeli fears that weapons could backfire Milshtein warned that the weapons and drones supplied to the militias could eventually pose a threat to Israel itself, either by being transferred to other parties or falling into the hands of Hamas.
He said previous experiences across the region had demonstrated that supporting local armed groups could produce unintended and damaging consequences in the long term. Controversial figures The report noted that the leaders of these groups were not traditionally influential figures in Palestinian society.
Yasser Abu Shabab, who led one of the largest militias before his death in 2025, had previously faced allegations of smuggling and looting.
Milshtein said Israel had chosen to work with controversial figures with various criminal backgrounds in the hope of transforming them into an alternative to Hamas, a choice he described as fundamentally problematic from the outset. Lack of review and accountability Milshtein also strongly criticized Israeli security agencies, saying the project was being managed without any genuine review or serious assessment of its results.
He said the absence of oversight and accountability had allowed mistakes to continue and be repeated.
The Zman Yisrael report concluded that the Israeli-backed militia project had so far failed to achieve its stated objective of creating a local force capable of competing with Hamas or imposing a new reality in Gaza.
That failure, it said, has prompted growing questions inside Israel over the project’s future and overall usefulness. A failed attempt to manufacture a local alternative Commenting on the report, Palestinian writer and security affairs specialist Rami Abu Zubaydah said Israeli media coverage of Gaza’s armed militias had initially sought to promote the idea of a “local alternative” to Hamas.
He said the approach was rooted in an Israeli view that the war would not end simply by weakening the military structure of the Palestinian resistance, but would also require creating a new political and security reality administered by local forces tied to and cooperating with Israel.
Abu Zubaydah said the striking development was that Israeli media itself had now begun discussing the failure of the project, with some outlets describing it as a “resounding failure.”
He said this marked a significant shift in Israel’s assessment of the situation in Gaza and exposed the wide gap between the objectives Israel sought to achieve and the results produced on the ground.
The militia project, he explained, was based on groups that received direct Israeli support in various forms, including weapons and logistical and security assistance.
Israel had hoped these groups would confront the resistance and create an alternative model that could help it administer parts of Gaza.
However, Israeli reports published more than a year and a half after the project began indicate that the results were the opposite of what had been expected, Abu Zubaydah said. No public legitimacy One of the clearest signs of failure, he added, was the complete absence of popular legitimacy.
Israeli reports themselves quoted Gaza residents as saying that these groups lacked any national or social legitimacy, while Palestinian factions widely regarded them as organizations tied to and serving the occupation.
Abu Zubaydah said Israel had failed to secure the most important element needed for any political or security project to succeed: popular acceptance.
Historical experience, he added, had shown that any authority lacking genuine community support becomes a fragile entity whose survival depends entirely on foreign power and military protection. Geographic failure Another indication of failure was the geographic reality inside Gaza, Abu Zubaydah said.
The information cited in the Israeli report showed that the overwhelming majority of Gaza’s population still lived in areas under Hamas’s influence, while discussion of alternative zones or parallel authorities had remained theoretical and had not developed into a tangible reality on the ground.
He noted that Israeli media itself had acknowledged that figures selected to lead the groups, including Ghassan al-Duhaini and Ashraf al-Mansi, lacked a record of national involvement or meaningful influence within the Palestinian society.
Some of them also faced widespread doubts regarding their legitimacy and social standing.
Abu Zubaydah said Milshtein’s description of the experiment as an effort to manufacture an alternative from the “lower strata” of Palestinian society amounted to a clear Israeli admission that the attempt to build a genuine rival to established Palestinian forces through such figures had failed. A threat to their own sponsors Abu Zubaydah concluded that growing Israeli concerns about the militias revealed another dimension of the crisis.
After supplying the groups with weapons and support, Israeli voices had begun warning that the militias could eventually turn against those operating them or that their weapons could be transferred to other parties.
He said these warnings reflected a growing Israeli realization that the groups were not strategic allies, but opportunistic and mercenary formations driven by narrow interests.
This, he added, made the entire project far more likely to end in failure than success.