"My clan is spread over an area that extends from the Negev to the Sinai. We are a big family and everyone supports me and my actions," said Yasser Abu Shabab in his first interview for an Israeli media outlet.
A Bedouin from the Tarabin tribe, Abu Shabab, organized armed groups to fight Hamas in Gaza, reportedly with weapons provided by Israel.
Abu Shabab fighters in southern Gaza
Don’t call us a militia. We are groups fighting terrorism in the Gaza Strip," he says with a smile. Hamas has branded him a traitor. "They call me a criminal, a thief, a member of ISIS, all to frighten people and keep them from contacting me," he said. "But that has not worked. Anyone who kidnaps and kills children, like the Bibas family, has no right to define or judge others. They are subhuman, vile and despicable people and their end is near."
Abu Shabab was living in Sinai and only returned to the Gaza Strip a couple of months before the October 7 massacre.
"Hamas planned their attack on the fateful day, and carried out their attacks without any consideration of the miserable people living in Gaza," he said. "We lost everything. We lost our homes, property, jobs and money while they live in their tunnels underground and lack nothing. Is there a wrong greater than that?"
He said he and his family moved from Rafah to the humanitarian zone in al-Mawasi. "We saw a difficult life there with hunger, a lack of basic provisions and humiliation and that is when I contacted the Palestinian Authority that supports me."
The first to respond was Mahmoud al-Habbash, an advisor to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. "I could not stand the humiliation of suffering of war, especially after Hamas treated us with suspicion because of our connection to the clan in the Sinai, which opposes the Muslim Brothers," he said. "They murdered 52 people, among them my brother, and we Bedouins have honor. We cannot remain silent after such painful humiliation, so I decided, with the support of the PA, to form the Abu-Shabab group."
Soon after moving to the humanitarian safe zone, Abu Shabab said he saw how Hamas was disrupting the distribution of aid. "They took all of it," he said. "I decided this cannot go on and began stopping the aid trucks and taking the food to give to the people. I did this for months. Hamas was after me, but my conscious was clear because I was feeding women and children."
Over time, his popularity grew and dozens of young Gazans joined him. "Anyone who had a gun would come and fight alongside us," he said. "Those who hid weapons, handed them over to me and I felt I was on the right track. Hamas became very weak. We see this on the ground. They run like mice when we fight them. They have new recruits, but those are untrained teenagers who are given guns but don't know what to do with them."
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Abu Shabab says he wants all of the Israeli hostages to go home and the fighting to end. "All innocents, from all sides, should be allowed to return home," he said. "The people of Gaza have paid an unbearable price for an insane terror group and we will not leave the Strip. We will fight Hamas until the last one of them," he said.
In Rafah, the group has been coordinating with the PA, which has delivered humanitarian aid directly to them. "We are joined by people from all over and we help them. They are afraid to live here because it has not been declared a safe zone by the IDF, although we have our own water wells and have even opened a school."
But he denies any connection to Israel. "We are men of peace and do not want war," he said. "We are connected only to the Palestinian Authority, no more."