Israel cuts off its nose to spite its face

 

By James M. Dorsey

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Even by its own standards. Israel is cutting off its nose to spite its face.

On Sunday, Israel scored an own goal when it targeted the compound of Gaza's powerful Doghmush clan, killing 25 extended family members.

Located in Gaza City's Sabra district adjacent to the city's municipality, the Doghmush have long had a troubled relationship with Hamas.

Without identifying the Doghmush by name, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has long hoped that the family, despite its chequered past, and other clans would serve as a Palestinian fig leaf in a post-war Gaza administration that would exclude Hamas and the West Bank-based, internationally recognised Palestine Authority and would be subservient to the Jewish state.

It was a strategy that was doomed from the outset.

“With Gaza's social structure unravelling, entire families collapsing, and mass displacement from permanent residences that once formed family zones and local political power centres, the influence of these family and tribal leaders has eroded,” said Middle East analyst Zvi Bar’el.

Mr. Bar’el warned that even if clans were to become de facto administrators of Gaza, the US experience in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria suggests it would likely lead to “street fighting, deadly vendettas, looting, and the formation of rival groups who would fight not only each other but also (Israeli) troops.”

“What proved true in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria is unlikely to be any different in Gaza,” Mr. Bar’el said.

Israel struck the Doghmush compound on the same day that the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia, followed a day later by France, Portugal, Belgium, Andorra, Luxembourg, Malta, and Monaco, recognised Palestine as a state.

Moreover, the attack occurred amid reports that the Israeli military and Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic security agency, employed Gazan militias to carry out military operations in exchange for pay and control of territory.

Mr. Netanyahu’s hopes that the Doghmush would cooperate with Israeli forces were initially buoyed when the clan’s leaders supported anti-Hamas protests.

Even so, the prime minister's hopes didn't shield the Doghmush from the death and destruction suffered by Gaza's 2.3 million Palestinians in the two-year war that has killed more than 65,000 people and reduced the Strip to an uninhabitable pile of rubble.

Doghmush family elders

Sunday's killing of the 25 Doghmush members suggests that the clan was not one of those families willing to cooperate with Israeli forces. The attack was not the first time that disaster struck the clan.

Even so, it’s hard to see how the targeting of the Doghmush serves Mr. Netanyahu’s illusory war goal of “totally” destroying Hamas and encouraging non-affiliated Gazans to cooperate with Israel.

If anything, Sunday’s strike is likely to reinforce anti-Israeli sentiment Mr. Netanyahu would have liked to have seen directed at Hamas, whose popularity in Gaza has hit rock bottom.

An Israeli strike in November 2023 against a mosque owned by the Doghmush in the same area attacked on Sunday, killed 44 people, many of them extended family members.

Human rights lawyers earlier this month filed a lawsuit in Germany against an Israeli soldier of German origin suspected of involvement in the targeted killing of unarmed Palestinian civilians in Gaza, four of them members of the Doghmush clan.

Known as smugglers and arms dealers, clan members were associated with the extremes of the political spectrum, including Hamas and Israel.

Army of Islam

Members of the clan established in 2005 the jihadist Army of Islam that frequently clashed with Hamas. The group had links to an Islamic State affiliate in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula.

The Army was involved in multiple kidnappings, including the 2006 abduction of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, who the group held for several months before he was turned over to Hamas.

Mr. Shalit was released in 2011 in exchange for 1,027 Palestinians held in Israeli prisons, including Yahya Sinwar, the senior Hamas official responsible for Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack on Israel. Israel killed Mr. Sinwar in October 2024.

A former Army of Islam operative, Ghassan al-Dahini, is currently a commander in the Israel-backed, anti-Hamas Anti-Terror Service headed by Yasser Abu Shabab, an alleged drug dealer.

In March 2024, Hamas allegedly killed Saleh Ashur, a prominent Doghmush figure, accusing him of looting trucks entering Gaza loaded with humanitarian aid. The clan said Mr. Ashur died in an Israeli strike last November.

Hamas reportedly hoped the killing would deter clans from collaborating with Israeli forces.

Whatever the case, Mr. Ashur’s killing prompted several clans, including the Doghmush, to insist in a statement that they would only cooperate with institutions authorized by the Palestine Authority’s backbone, the Palestine Liberation Organisation or PLO, which they described as “the only representative of the Palestinian people."

The clans demanded that “Hamas stop accusing us of treason and apostasy. Our nation can no longer bear the foreign concepts Hamas is trying to disseminate through its toxic media."

A year later, clan leaders participated in April 2025 in a second round of anti-Hamas protests staged despite the group’s brutal crackdown on demonstrators a month earlier.

In response, members of the influential Abu Samra family tracked down and killed a Hamas police officer they claimed had murdered their son, Abdul Rahman.

At the time, Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib, an outspoken Palestinian American Hamas critic who lost 33 relatives in the Gaza war, argued that “the people of Gaza are completely against Hamas and against the group’s terror and the squandering of their lives and resources for absolutely nothing.”

Nevertheless, Israeli efforts to entice major Gazan clans to cooperate with Israel are complicated by the fact that many families do not want be seen as collaborating in Israeli efforts to squash Palestinian national aspirations and ethnically cleanse the Strip by forcing Palestinians to 'voluntarily' leave because the territory is uninhabitable.

In a series of recent postings on his Facebook page, Israeli Major General Ghassan Alian, the coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT), who oversees civilian life in the West Bank and Gaza, said he was working to facilitate the departure of Gazans.

"We hear you and know that some of you want to leave the Gaza Strip. You tell us so in the comments and in private messages. We do not limit departures, and we will continue to coordinate additional exit operations," he wrote.

Dr. James M. Dorsey is an Adjunct Senior Fellow at Nanyang Technological University’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, and the author of the syndicated column and podcast, The Turbulent World with James M. Dorsey.