Can tribal clans impose order in Gaza?

Israel is trying to use some to challenge Hamas rule; others pay lip service to Hamas while asserting local power.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

Tribal clans have begun asserting power in various cities and regions in the Gaza Strip, either in direct challenge to Hamas or while still paying lip service to the terror organization.

Those openly defying Hamas include the Popular Forces militia led by Yasser Abu Shabab, of the Bedouin Al-Tarbin tribe, which has established an area in eastern Rafah that is Hamas-free, where food is distributed and even schools have opened.

Although he claims not to receive any assistance from Israel, his stronghold is under the total control of the IDF and a Haaretz newspaper report on Sunday cited Gazan sources who said the group receives logistical and intelligence help from the IDF.

According to Abu Ali Express, a Telegram news channel, this militia also helps secure the aid efforts of the private American-based aid group, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which, since last month, has opened four food distribution centers in southern Gaza and tries to prevent Hamas from stealing it.

The Haaretz report noted that in the northern Gaza Strip, several powerful families have “stepped into the vacuum” created by the IDF’s weakening of Hamas forces to “supervise the arrival of [aid] trucks” to distribution sites “and prevent them from being attacked or looted.”

“Where there is control by clans, there is order,” an aid security activist speaking for one of the families told the Hebrew language daily.

He and others interviewed in the report claimed that Israel prefers and even “fosters” the “chaos and theft” in areas under its control, because it has nefarious motives in creating alternatives to Hamas rule.

Some clans are either closely or loosely identified with Hamas and are seemingly eager to grab more power than they previously enjoyed.

The report said that a group called the Association of Families and Mukhtars in the Southern Districts put out a statement in May that they “are prepared to accept practical responsibility for essential aspects of life in Gaza,” while still expressing support for Hamas and “Palestinian resistance factions.”

Yet they also demanded “increased involvement of the Palestinian Authority (PA) in civil affairs,” the report said, although the PA and Hamas are deadly rivals vying for control of all Palestinian-held territory.

This does seemingly show that despite their qualified successes in recent months, at least some Gaza clans acknowledge that they cannot simply divide the Strip into many small loci of power to replace a centralized government.

Such a suggestion has been previously made by some Israeli army officials, based on the fact that tribal and family clans have historically played a large role in Arab society, with clan elders adjudicating all kinds of financial and personal disputes, no matter who was officially in charge of their state, region, city or village.