Hamas has started court-martialing detainee jihadists accused of associations with the Islamic State as well as the relatives of accused militants, according to jihadi sources in Gaza affiliated with IS ideology.
The sources said that since last week 13 jihadists have been court-martialed, including a ring of four who were charged with belonging to a single Islamic State cell. No verdict has been delivered to date.
Close to 700 jihadi detainees are expected to be court-martialed in the coming weeks. Only 23 have been released, the sources said.
The sources said that Hamas’ interrogations unit has forwarded the cases of the detainees to the organization’s military prosecutor ahead of being indicted.
The defendants will be court-martialed even though none of them belong to Hamas or Palestinian Authority security forces, according to the sources.
“This is unprecedented in Palestine,” Abu Baker Almaqdesi, an IS-supporting jihadi in Gaza, told Breitbart Jerusalem. “Hamas prosecutes jihadists who support the Islamic State and fired rockets at the Jews.”
“We are not surprised that Hamas treats ideological disagreements as treason, and believes it has a monopoly on resistance,” he added. “Despite all the physical and mental pressure that is applied on them, our detainees’ spirit has not been broken.”
Maqdesi said there’s no difference between Hamas and the more secular PA: “It is clear that there’s no difference between those who cooperate with the Jewish enemy in the West Bank and those who detain jihadists in the Gaza Strip and prosecute them just because they fire at the Jews and refuse to respect the humiliating cease-fire that Hamas agreed to with the Jews.”
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