Afrasianet - Activating local militias in Gaza to serve the IDF and prepare them as an "auxiliary force," providing them with weapons and licenses to kill for money, and controlling a geographic area all endanger IDF soldiers and bring Israel into conflict, not only with the residents of the Gaza Strip, but also with the international community. As Haaretz revealed, these militias are not only combing tunnels and suspicious buildings, but also engaged in "substantial military activities."

Some of the officers we spoke with warned that Control of these local forces is limited, as they are not subject to the IDF's instructions, and may even carry out a massacre for which IDF officers are held responsible.

This experiment is not new, and its results are already known. In Lebanon, the Israeli army formed the South Lebanon Army, using local forces that were not under an organized framework.

In the West Bank, too, there was a failed attempt to establish "village associations" in the early 1980s, which officially did not function as a military militia, but rather as a civilian body aimed at weakening the PLO and developing a political alternative to self-rule. But the lieutenants, who were armed to defend themselves, in many cases used it to intimidate and "persuade" opponents to join their organizations.

Israel does not have a patent for this invention, and so does anyone who establishes, recruits, and uses militias, assuming that he can control the actions of militia soldiers, dictate orders to open fire on them, loot, loot, and kill, or turn them into a political force that runs the occupied territory or helps impose the occupation. In most cases, these assumptions were shattered on the rock of reality, which was ultimately dictated by the local militias themselves. The country that has accumulated the largest and most bitter experience in the use of militias is the United States.

In July 2017, President Trump tweeted, "I will stop the dangerous and wasteful payments sent to the rebels in Syria who are fighting against Assad," an inaccurate tweet. Trump did not cancel all the plans to help the rebels, but the CIA's plans. The forces that the Pentagon, mainly the Kurdish rebel forces in northern Syria, continued to receive funding.

This was a difficult but logical decision.The administration found that the operation not only cost exorbitant sums of money—nearly $1 billion in four years in which these militias were used, but even after the extensive training program and the amount of weapons they obtained, the results on the ground were minimal. More dangerously, these U.S. militias, sponsored by the Pentagon and sponsored by the CIA, fought each other. For example, in February 2016, the Kurdish militias formed by the Pentagon expelled Knights al-Haq militia fighters from the city of Marea, 20 km north of Aleppo, which was operated under the auspices of the CIA.

This confrontation, which was not the only one among the U.S. militias, may have been tolerable, but it turned out that the vast amount of weapons, including anti-armor missiles, that the CIA transferred to its rebels, made way for Jabhat al-Nusra, which was still an offshoot of al-Qaeda. Jabhat al-Nusra" was headed by Abu Muhammad al-Jolani, who broke away from al-Qaeda in 2016 and created Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham.

Since then, al-Jolani has given up his secret name and reverted to his real name Ahmed al-Shara, and now he is the president of Syria and receives the patronage of President Trump, Turkey and Saudi Arabia. In fact, Turkey is the "biggest winner" from the success of the Sharia, which over the years has received financial, intelligence, and military assistance from Turkey, which has created the "national duty" and the Sharia's dependence on Ankara.

Not only are it Druze and Kurdish militias that are now undermining his ambition to establish a unified Syrian state, but dozens of independent militias and gangs still operate in the country and control parts of it.

Ironically, the Pentagon, the CIA, and the U.S. administration in general should have learned their lesson from the use of local militias. Even in the war between the former Soviet Union and Afghanistan in 1979-1989, the CIA employed local mujahideen forces that proved effective and succeeded in pushing Soviet forces to withdraw from the country.

But as in Syria, U.S. operators in Afghanistan have struggled to control local forces, establish codes of conduct and fire orders, and prevent the loss of equipment and weapons. When the war against the Soviet Union ended, a bloody civil war broke out in the country between tribes and militias, and millions of people fled to Pakistan, Iran, and other countries. At the end of the conflict, a Taliban insurgency emerged, which was later designated a terrorist organization, and embraced Osama bin Laden, the founder of al-Qaeda.

The use of local militias by an occupying power is quite tempting, the basis of which lies in providing the lives of the occupying power's fighters. But as U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan have learned, militias can change their aim, shoot at those who trained, financed them, or even prepared them to be an alternative governing force. One of the most understandable is Hamas, which shortly after taking control of the Strip in 2007. A campaign was launched to dismantle these tribal and family militias.

These families built up their strength during the rule of Yasser Arafat, who, upon returning to the Gaza Strip and the West Bank after signing the Oslo Accords, realized that he had to enlist the trust of the heads of large families, such as the Halas family, the Astal, the Masri, the Daghmash, and the leadership of the Bedouin tribes, to counter the opposition of the younger generation.

The devotion of these families, who had large business interests and accumulated money and economic influence even before Arafat's return, recruited him through senior positions in PLO institutions and in government ministries and municipalities, with generous budgets.

These arrangements began to disintegrate in the second intifada when the leaders of large families found it difficult to control the activities of the armed resistance of the youth, who imposed allegiance to Fatah, prevented them from joining Hamas and other organizations that became a center of attraction and recruitment, and replaced family loyalty.

It is now difficult to estimate the influence and power of large families and Bedouin tribes. In official statements posted on the Facebook pages of the Union of Tribes and Families, the Union opposes cooperation with Israel and the Israeli military, most of whom see the Palestinian Authority and the PLO as their sole representatives, and some of them have publicly disavowed the militias set up by the IDF led by gang leaders, including Yasser Abu Shabab and Rami Halas, who act as mercenaries.

At the same time, the efforts of the Israeli army, the Shin Bet, and the head of Palestinian intelligence, Majed Faraj, who in 2024 tried to establish militias from large families, have so far not borne fruit.

It can be estimated that in the face of the collapse of the social structure in the Gaza Strip, the destruction of entire families, and the mass displacement from fixed places of residence that have also created "family squares" and local political power centers, the power bases of the heads of these families and tribes have also collapsed. In addition to losing the ability to help their family members, they have also lost The conclusion is that Israel finds itself in Gaza in a much worse and more dangerous reality than the one in which U.S. forces operated in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In these two countries, a local civilian government was formed in cooperation with the occupation. Even if it does not gain local legitimacy and is considered collaborating with the occupier, and needs tens of billions of dollars in U.S. funding, it has at least absolved U.S. forces of the need to run the state directly.

The slippery slope may develop here in which the local militias recruited by the Israeli army become a kind of "civil administration" for the Gaza Strip, who will be responsible not only for accompanying and distributing food convoys, but also for carrying out policing activities, quick settlements, distributing plots of land to set up shelters, activating means of transportation, and controlling vital resources such as fuel and water.

The size of this control forces the militias to recruit thousands of "volunteers," who will need to be armed and financed for their activities, so the distance will be short to Street warfare, deadly settling of scores with looting and looting, and ultimately the formation of rival organizations that fight each other, and even the IDF forces. What was in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria could not be different in Gaza.

Zvi Brail

Hartzs 19/9/2025