The United Nations has issued a report so damning of Hamas that it can no longer be ignored: the terrorist organization ruling Gaza has beaten, maimed, and publicly executed its own civilian population, committing what the report explicitly calls war crimes.
The UN International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory released its findings on June 9, documenting the systematic campaign of terror that Hamas has waged not only against Israel, but against the very people it claims to govern.
The commission identified 249 cases of executions and severe physical violence in 2024–2025, resulting in at least 108 deaths and 384 injured. Hamas-affiliated forces were involved in at least 60 of these incidents, including two public executions of 11 men. The report classifies these acts as war crimes of murder and torture, violations of international humanitarian and human rights law.
The methods were medieval. Three Hamas-affiliated forces were found responsible: the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades (the military wing of Hamas), the Sahm Unit (a plain-clothed paramilitary force created in March 2024 by Gaza’s Ministry of the Interior), and the Rad’a Force (established in June 2025 as a paramilitary police force targeting alleged collaborators and rival factions). At least 45 cases were attributed to the Sahm Unit alone, resulting in approximately 14 executions and 101 injuries.
The executions were not carried out in secret. They were staged as public spectacles.
On October 13, 2025, the Sahm Unit published video footage of the public summary execution of eight blindfolded and handcuffed men from the same family in Gaza City. A month earlier, three blindfolded men were shot by masked gunmen outside Gaza City’s al-Shifa Hospital before a crowd of onlookers. Both groups were accused of collaborating with Israel. No trial. No judge. No appeal.
Hamas did not come to power through legitimacy. On June 15, 2007, Hamas seized control of Gaza in a dramatic and violent coup, expelling the forces of the rival Fatah party in brutal clashes that left 188 people dead and more than 650 wounded. The methods were those of a criminal syndicate, not a government. During the fighting, Hamas gunmen threw opponents off high-rise buildings, shot a Fatah militant 40 times outside his home, and killed a Hamas cleric in front of a mosque. President Mahmoud Abbas called it what it was: a coup.
Since seizing power, Hamas has ruled through fear. The wave of executions documented in the UN report is not a wartime aberration — it is the continuation of a pattern established the moment Hamas took Gaza by force.
A New York Times investigation from June 2024 revealed widespread anger among ordinary Gazans at Hamas’s callous disregard for the population — specifically how Hamas leadership was protected in underground tunnels while civilians remained above ground with no protection. One Gazan interviewed said that Hamas “threw the people” into the conflict while sheltering its own commanders beneath their feet.
The tunnels’ electricity — for lighting, air circulation, and communications — was powered largely by solar panels siphoned off from nearby civilian buildings. Hamas did not merely deny civilians protection. It took from them what little power they had to build its own underground city.
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