At around 10:20 Tuesday morning, ten or so armed men rode into the al-Katiba area of western Gaza City on motorcycles, backed by a convoy of vans, and opened fire on Muein al-Arabid, who Israel claims is the head of Gaza's internal security services, which itself isn't true. They were not an Israeli unit, they were a militia, one of several the regime arms and pays inside the Strip, and they had come to take a policeman. A Palestinian security source told Al Jazeera the man taken was a lower-ranking officer, not the head of police.

Palestinian security forces engaged the militia, but al-Arabid was wounded, seized, and driven into Israel. As soon as the gang was seen to struggle against the Gaza police, Israeli shelling and drone fire hit the surrounding streets, covering the gunmen as they withdrew, and killing four Palestinians, three of them children and one a woman, according to Gaza's civil defence agency and al-Shifa hospital.

Israel Katz, Israel's Minister of Defence, announced the capture within hours, and the IDF and Shin Bet then confirmed the raid in a joint statement, framing it as part of the campaign to disarm Hamas. Netanyahu commended both agencies for what he called a bold operation and used the word arrested. Ynet, briefed by Israeli officials, reported that no Israeli ground troops took part at all and that local militias carried it out under Southern Command. We should note here that Hamas has already agreed to disarm, an offer rejected by Israel.

The ISA is Shin Bet, the domestic intelligence service, which tells you what kind of operation this was: not the army stumbling into a gunfight but an intelligence agency running a proxy hit squad across the yellow line, with the army supplying the artillery to bring it back. It also removes the last ambiguity from a picture Israeli soldiers had already described. Five days ago they told Haaretz they were being ordered to protect militias they believe are being sent into Gaza to commit war crimes, with some warning the arrangement was heading toward something resembling Sabra and Shatila. The men those soldiers were shielding were Shin Bet assets.

Israel's official statements do not name the group. Israeli media named it anyway, as the Popular Forces, the militia the regime admitted arming in 2025 and has favoured since, and a Gaza security source told AFP an Israeli-allied militia took part. If that is right, the transport is the story. The Popular Forces are based in eastern Rafah, inside the zone the army holds, and al-Katiba is the length of the Strip away on the other side of the line. Ten men and a van convoy did not make that journey unassisted. Israeli officials told Ynet the raid was carried out by militias local to the Gaza City area, which would mean either that the Popular Forces now have a northern arm operating that deep, or that a second armed proxy exists in Gaza City that nobody has yet named.

The target set is the tell. Through 2026 the regime has been killing Gaza's police from the air, at least a dozen documented attacks by June, hitting officers while they directed traffic and patrolled markets, until the UN human rights office said plainly that Israeli forces appear to draw no distinction between police and armed fighters. That distinction is the whole of the law here. Police are civilians unless they take direct part in hostilities, which is a judgement to be made man by man, and Israel has spent the year declining to make it. Today the men on the motorcycles went after the same institution from the ground. Two instruments, one target list. Whatever remains of civil order in Gaza is being dismantled by an air force and a gang, and the gang is on the payroll.

Who are the "Popular Forces"?

The Popular Forces are the largest of the Israeli-armed militias operating inside Gaza, several hundred fighters holding eastern Rafah and the ground behind the yellow line, and the regime has spent two years presenting them as the alternative to Hamas. They began as a looting crew. Their founder, Yasser Abu Shabab, was a Tarabin Bedouin in a Hamas cell on theft and drug charges when the war started and out of it when the prisons broke, and his men surfaced stripping aid convoys in the Israeli-held corridor, where nothing moves without the army's permission. The regime, which controlled that corridor absolutely, discovered it had no view on the matter. By 2025 the looting had a name and Israeli weapons. Lieberman exposed the arming, Netanyahu confirmed it and called it saving soldiers' lives, and Abu Shabab's own clan disowned him and declared his blood licit.

On 4 December 2025 his deputy detained a man named Juma Abu Suneima for diverting food to Hamas. Juma's brother Mahmoud, who ran distribution for the militia, went to Abu Shabab's house to get him back and was offered three outcomes: keep him, hand him to the Israeli army, kill him. Mahmoud shot him instead. Both brothers died there. Abu Shabab was evacuated toward Soroka in Beersheba and died of the wounds, and the hospital then denied he had been admitted at all. The Abu Suneima are East Rafah and they are Tarabin, the same tribe. He was killed over food, by his cousins, in an argument about which of them got to sell it.

Then the accounts began. The militia said he fell settling a family dispute. Israeli defence sources called it an internal clash and stressed it was not Hamas. An Israeli security official told Ynet he had been beaten to death in a row about collaborating with Israel, which is the regime's version delivered through a channel it can disown, and it is worth asking why the regime wanted that particular detail in circulation. Only one thing survives all three tellings, and it is that nobody who mattered to him was Hamas.

Ghassan Duhine took over the next day. He is 38, Tarabin, a former first lieutenant in Palestinian Authority security who later joined Jaysh al-Islam, the Gaza faction with ISIS ties, and he tells interviewers he is a Salafi who studied shari'a and memorised the Qur'an. Palestinian sources say he ran the thing operationally the whole time, and that Abu Shabab was the face because Israel needed a face. He holds Rafah and the ground behind the yellow line, on the same guns, from the same paymaster.