What happened
These killings are documented separately from Hamas's conduct toward Israel because they illustrate a different and equally important part of the record: how Hamas has policed its own population during the war, under the extreme pressure of military defeat, mass displacement, and the collapse of ordinary policing and judicial functions across Gaza.
Verified video circulated in November 2024 showed armed men, identified by witnesses and analysts as Hamas-linked, shooting a group of accused looters execution-style in a Gaza City street in front of onlookers, with no evident trial, defense, or judicial process of any kind. Human Rights Watch and other monitors documented a pattern of similar killings of people accused of collaborating with Israel or providing intelligence used in strikes, some of them clearly summary executions carried out by masked gunmen rather than any recognizable judicial body.
Hamas has defended some of these actions as necessary wartime security measures given the risk of Israeli infiltration and intelligence-gathering that has, in fact, enabled a number of documented Israeli strikes on specific individuals and locations. That security concern is real. It does not change the fact that killing people without any trial, on accusations that were never tested by an independent process, is the kind of unaccountable exercise of power the project holds every government and armed group in this ledger to the same standard on — including, elsewhere in this same file, the Palestinian Authority's own record of torture and unlawful killings in custody.