On the fourth day of Israel’s war with Gaza in December 2008, as more than 350 people had already been killed by the assault (and 1,434 would be killed by war’s end) The New York Times’ Taghreed El-Khodary described a stunning scene at Shifa Hospital in Gaza that had nothing to do with the war. El-Khodary was talking to the hospital director, Dr. Hussein Ashour, who was describing the difficulties he was having in keeping patients alive with little equipment. At the time, there were 1,500 wounded spread around Gaza’s nine hospitals. As El-Khodary talked to the doctor, he saw armed, masked militants roaming the hospital’s hallways. They claimed to be conducting security.
That wasn’t the case. For all the bloodletting beyond the hospital walls, “there was internal bloodletting under way,” El-Khodary wrote (in an article also authored by Ethan Bronner): Hamas militants were on the hunt for “collaborators,” whom they would stop and summarily execute on the spot. Luckier ones would be tortured and released. El-Khodary witnessed just that sort of extra-judicial murder:

In the fourth-floor orthopedic section, a woman in her late 20s asked a militant to let her see Saleh Hajoj, her 32-year-old husband. She was turned away and left the hospital. Fifteen minutes later, Mr. Hajoj was carried out by young men pretending to transfer him to another ward. As he lay on the stretcher, he was shot in the left side of the head.
Mr. Hajoj, like five others killed at the hospital this way in 24 hours, was accused of collaboration with Israel. He had been in the central prison awaiting trial by Hamas judges; when Israel destroyed the prison on Sunday he and the others were transferred to the hospital. But their trials were short-circuited.

A crowd at the hospital showed no mercy after the shooting, which was widely observed. A man in his 30s mocked a woman expressing horror at the scene.

“This horrified you?” he shouted. “A collaborator that caused the death of many innocent and resistance fighters?”

The murder wasn’t an isolated abuse by a rogue band of militants. It was policy. Hamas took advantage of the Israeli assault to settle scores wholesale, as a new report by Human Rights Watch, “Under Cover of War,” concludes. The killings took place during the 22-day war but did not stop when hostilities stopped. In all, Hamas executed 18 people during the war and 14 more since, usually on allegations that the murdered victims were Israeli collaborators.
Hamas itself, let’s not fail to note, owes its existence in part to an extensive collaborationist past with Israel .

Collaborators or Rivals?
In the first days of Israel’s assault on Gaza, an Israeli bombardment destroyed Hamas’ central prison, killing some inmates but also enabling dozens to go free. The cover of war enabled Hamas to eliminate so-called “collaborators,” but also rivals: Those murdered included members of Fatah, the political faction that controls the West Bank and lost power to Hamas in Gaza in 2006, first through parliamentary elections, then through a brief civil war that pitted the two factions in 2007. Members of Fatah’s security services were especially targeted.

Beatings, Maimings and Torture
When not murdering rivals or “collaborators,” Hamas took to maiming them by shooting them in the legs, or beating them and breaking their arms and legs—a tactic British forces used against Jews and Arabs during the British mandate over Palestine in the first half of the 20th century, and that Israeli forces used against Palestinian civilians in the Occupied Territories during the first intifada in the 1980s. Public outrage, especially in Israel, ended the tactic, at least as a systematic method of control and summary punishment. Far from forgetting the method, Palestinian forces have applied it to their own since.

In Gaza, according top the Palestinian Independent Commission for Human Rights, masked men deliberately shot in the legs at least 49 people between Dec. 28, the first day of the war, and Jan. 31 2009. In addition, 73 Gaza men had their arms or legs, or both arms and legs, broken by unidentified thugs.

HRW reports one particularly gruesome case of murder and maiming:

Around 6 p.m. on January 4, 2009, members of the al-Najjar family were sitting outside their home in the Sheikh Radwan neighborhood of Gaza City when four men wearing masks and carrying AK-47 assault rifles approached the house. Two family members who were present told Human Rights Watch that the gunmen wore unmarked black uniforms and ammunition vests, but the family did not identify them as Hamas. When the gunmen ordered everyone to stand up and raise their hands, the head of the household, Hisham al-Najjar, age 55, protested, the two witnesses said. An argument ensued and one of the gunmen fired a shot, hitting no one. At least five women inside the house came rushing out, and in the chaos the gunmen opened fire, killing Hisham al-Najjar and wounding ten members of the family and a family friend. The victims ranged in age from a 12-year old girl, Ahlam Hisham al-Najjar, who was shot in the leg, to Zakkia al-Najjar, 70, Ahlam’s grandmother, who was shot in both legs.
Hamas Is as Fatah Does
Retaliatory torture by Fatah has been reported in the West Bank, where Fatah-run authorities have attacked and tortured dozens of Hamas sympathizers. According to Human Rights Watch, Palestinian human rights groups reported 31 complaints of torture between the end of Deccmber and the beginning of February 2009. “They also recorded one known death in custody and the arbitrary detention of two journalists from a private television station considered pro-Hamas. United States and European Union donors who fund and train these forces have expressed no public criticism of these serious human rights violations,” HRW writes.

The murders, beatings and torture either by Hamas or Fatah are abuses of law that contravene the Palestinians’ own Basic Law, which guarantees due process, freedom of expression and association. Those rights have generally not been respected in Occupied Palestine.