The Gaza-ruling Islamist terror group Hamas utilized their 2014 summer war against Israel to execute innocent Palestinians, according to a new report from Amnesty International, a human rights NGO.
The Amnesty report alleges that Hamas engaged in a “brutal campaign of abductions, torture and unlawful killings against Palestinians accused of ‘collaborating’ with Israel,” the Times of Israel reports.
Furthermore, the report found that at least 23 Gaza Palestinians were executed in an “extrajudicial” manner.
“It is absolutely appalling that, while Israeli forces were inflicting massive death and destruction upon the people in Gaza, Hamas forces took the opportunity to ruthlessly settle scores, carrying out a series of unlawful killings and other grave abuses,” Amnesty International Middle East and North Africa director Philip Luther said about his organization’s investigation.
In one such incident, “six men were publicly executed by Hamas forces outside al-Omari mosque… in front of hundreds of spectators, including children,” the human rights watchdog found.
Hamas had described the six men as “collaborators” with Israel. After their fates were sealed, “each man was shot in the head individually before being sprayed with bullets fired from an AK-47,” said he report.
The bodies of the Palestinians were rendered unidentifiable, according to one of the victim’s brothers. He told Amnesty that Hamas treated his brother’s body “as if you’d put it in a bag and smashed it.”
The Palestinian terror group is largely seen as responsible for starting the 2014 50-day war with Israel, after the militant outfit refused to stop launching scores of indiscriminate rocket fire into Israel’s population centers, drawing a powerful response from Jerusalem.