Transparency & Accountability
Amnesty documents nine executions by Hamas-affiliated forces since the ceasefire
Graphic: Times of Palestine
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Amnesty International has published a finding that Hamas-affiliated forces in Gaza have killed Palestinians accused of collaborating with Israel without any judicial process, and that nobody has been held to account for it.
The organisation's statement, issued on 21 August, is titled a demand rather than a report: Hamas must stamp out extrajudicial executions and ensure justice for victims. Times of Palestine did not carry it at the time, and carries it now.
Amnesty says it documented nine extrajudicial executions and one further unlawful killing carried out after the October 2025 ceasefire. Its researchers verified photographs and video, took testimony from eleven family members of those killed and from two health workers, and analysed Hamas's own statements and Telegram channels.
The wider count is not Amnesty's. A United Nations report published in June identified 249 cases of extrajudicial execution and severe physical violence in Gaza between August 2024 and early 2026, at least sixty of them involving Hamas-affiliated forces.
The cases the organisation set out#
On 13 October 2025, eight unarmed men of the Dughmush family were executed in public following clashes with Hamas forces. A relative told Amnesty's researchers that the eight had turned themselves in after being promised a fair trial, and were executed two hours later.
The widow of one of them described what was done to her family and asked that it be known.
Both my husband and son were executed. My son was tortured before his execution, and his nails were broken. I want everybody to know that our family are not collaborators.
The widow of a man killed on 13 October 2025, quoted by Amnesty International, 21 August 2026
Four days after that killing, on 17 October 2025, Hisham al-Saftawi was shot in the back during an attempt to arrest him in the al-Bureij refugee camp. His brother's answer to the announcement of internal inquiries was one sentence: you cannot trust the executioner to investigate itself.
The practice did not end with the ceasefire year. On 1 July 2026 a body calling itself Resistance Security announced the public execution of a man it accused of informing Israeli forces about the location of Qassam Brigades leadership, an act it said led to the killing of the commander Ezziddine al-Haddad. It announced that a second alleged informant would be executed within days.
What Hamas has said#
Contacted in November 2025, Hamas authorities told Amnesty they had opened investigations into the incidents, without disclosing details. Mousa Abu Marzouk, who heads the movement's international and legal relations department, said the security forces had acted in an immediate reaction without referring to higher authorities.
Amnesty says it received no further response before publication, and that to its knowledge nobody involved in the killings has been held to account.
The demand, and the frame around it#
Amnesty asks Hamas to halt unlawful killings and arbitrary arrests immediately, to hold those responsible to account, to guarantee fair trials and due process, and to break the pattern of impunity.
Erika Guevara-Rosas, the organisation's senior director for research, advocacy, policy and campaigns, placed the demand inside the war rather than beside it, opening with the finding Amnesty has published repeatedly since December 2024 — that Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in the occupied Gaza Strip — and the observation that a traumatised civilian population has already endured unimaginable suffering.
That framing matters for how the finding is read. Amnesty is not offering the executions as a counterweight to what Israel has done. It is arguing that a population living under the one cannot be governed by the other, and that a Palestinian accused of collaboration is entitled to a court.
The institutions that would provide one — a functioning prosecution service, a judiciary, a defence bar — are among the things Gaza has lost, and rebuilding them is nobody's stated priority in any of the plans currently on the table.
