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Hamas executes three men accused of military leader’s assassination

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Hamas has executed three men convicted of assassinating the leader of its military wing.

Ashraf Abu Laila admitted to killing the head of the Izzadin Kassam Brigade, Mazen Fuqaha, two months ago. He and an alleged collaborator were hanged yesterday, while a third man was killed by a firing squad.

The executions were carried out at a police station in Gaza with hundreds of people watching. The terror group also recorded and broadcasted the executions live on Facebook.

Human Rights Watch released a statement condemning Hamas. It read: “Rushing to put men to death based on an unreviewable decision of a special military court days after announcing their arrests and airing videoed confessions smacks of militia rule, not the rule of law.”

The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights says that since it took over the Gaza Strip, in 2007, Hamas military courts have sentenced 28 people to death.

Abu Laila had previously been a member of Hamas’s military wing. He was apparently expelled for “moral offences,” although it was later claimed that he had joined one of the Salafi groups in the Gaza Strip and recruited by the Mossad.

Fuqaha was shot at close range in his garage with a pistol fitted with a silencer. In a statement shortly after his death, Hamas alleged that his killers were acting on behalf of Israel’s Shin Bet intelligence agency.

Fuqaha planned the June 2002 suicide bombing of a Jerusalem bus that killed 19 Israelis, and the bus bombing in Safed that killed nine Israelis in August the same year.

In 2003 he was sentenced to nine life sentences, but was released in 2011 in the Gilad Shalit prisoner exchange.

Since his assassination, Yahya Sinwar, Hamas’s new leader in Gaza, is believed to have ordered kidnapping operations and high casualty attacks against Israelis in the West Bank as revenge.