![\"'Pressure](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/1767108190_132_1920.jpg\")
‘Pressure and threats’: How Israel allegedly recruits Palestinians to help its occupation \u2013\u00a0video<\/p>\n‘Pressure and threats’: How Israel allegedly recruits Palestinians to help its occupation \u2013\u00a0video<\/p>\n
On Tuesday 14 October, Hamas handed over four bodies to Israel<\/a> as part of an exchange of the dead under the US-brokered Gaza ceasefire.<\/p>\n Israeli forensic experts soon confirmed the identities of three of the bodies, but they said that one did not belong to them. Hamas insisted that the fourth man was an Israeli soldier.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s one of yours,\u201d the Palestinian militant group is said to have replied.<\/p>\n In a way, they may both have been right.<\/p>\n The body was that of Khalil Dawas<\/a>, a Palestinian from Jericho suspected of working with Israeli forces. His story \u2013 like so many in the shadows of this conflict \u2013 is tangled in contradictions, grey zones, secrecy and betrayal.<\/p>\n The Guardian spoke to residents of Jericho\u2019s Aqabat Jabr refugee camp, including Palestinian fighters who said Dawas had been among them before, they said, turning informant. The accounts offer a glimpse of how IDF units enter Palestinian towns and enlist or pressure locals \u2013 through threats or money \u2013 to sustain the intelligence machinery of the occupation.<\/p>\n Israeli officials were also approached for comment.<\/p>\n Dawas\u2019s story begins in the city of Jabaliya in Gaza, where he was born and raised. Later, like many other Palestinian families, his parents decided to move to the West Bank<\/a>, settling in the village of Tell near Nablus.<\/p>\n \u201cThey were a modest household with five children,\u201d said Naser Shalwn, head of Aqabat Jabr camp and a board member of the Palestinian Prisoners\u2019 Club advocacy group. \u201cThey moved here in 2014 and bought a small home.\u201d<\/p>\n Dawas, then in his 20s, joined one of the Palestinian factions. Shalwn said he did not know which one, noting that although about 70% of the camp\u2019s residents supported Fatah, other groups \u2013 including Islamic Jihad and Hamas \u2013 were also present.<\/p>\n The same year, he was arrested along with his brother, and, said Shalwn, \u201clike many here he spent several years in prison\u201d.<\/p>\n Dawas spent six and a half years in total in Israeli prisons after two arrests, according to Shalwn. The Palestinian prisoners ministry, part of the Palestinian Authority, told Israeli media his last period in jail had been in 2020, when he was held in Ofer for six months without charge in administrative detention.<\/p>\n An Israeli vehicle outside Ofer prison in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. Photograph: Ammar Awad\/Reuters<\/p>\n Sources inside the camp suggest that his recruitment as a collaborator for the Israelis may have taken place during those six months.<\/p>\n Since 1967, Israel has run a vast intelligence network in the occupied territories, relying heavily on Palestinian collaborators. Coercion is often used as a tactic to recruit Palestinians, including pressure over work permits. According to former members of the military spy agency Unit 8200<\/a>, the mining of private data from phones and emails can also expose personal information that the Israeli intelligence community can exploit. <\/strong>Much of this leverage is exerted in Israeli prisons, where detainees are especially vulnerable.<\/p>\n Like most stories involving collaborators \u2013 riddled with questions that never find answers \u2013 the reason Dawas went from being detained by the Israelis to being believed to be cooperating with them remains a mystery.<\/p>\n A 2014 investigation by the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth<\/a> quoted a Unit 8200 dissident describing the many pressures used to force Palestinians to inform: \u201cIf you\u2019re a homosexual who knows someone who knows a wanted man \u2013 Israel will turn your life into a misery,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Those with secrets or urgent medical needs could also find their lives \u201cmade a misery\u201d until they provide intelligence on wanted relatives.<\/p>\n According to several faction members in Jericho, Dawas changed after his release, with camp residents beginning to notice unusual behaviour.<\/p>\n Naser Shalwn, head of Jericho\u2019s Aqabat Jabr refugee camp. Photograph: Lorenzo Tondo\/The Guardian<\/p>\n \u201cHe started selling bullets,\u201d Shalwn says. \u201cHe sold a box of ammunition in the camp for 200 shekels, when it normally cost 1,500. And that was something that began to alarm members of the resistance.\u201d<\/p>\n Bullet smugglers in the West Bank are often perceived as ambiguous figures. Israeli authorities sometimes use them as informants, allowing ammunition sales to proceed so the IDF can track buyers and identify suspected militants.<\/p>\n \u201cThe community of Aqabat Jabr began to doubt him,\u201d says Shalwn. \u201cDawas was asking unusual questions, and suspicion grew. An Israeli raid on the camp in early 2023 turned those suspicions into certainty,\u201d he claimed.<\/p>\n On 6 February 2023, after more than a week under siege, Israeli forces raided the Aqabat Jabr refugee camp<\/a> and killed at least five Palestinian men. Video from the IDF showed a large-scale assault in the darkness before dawn and witnesses later interviewed by Reuters<\/a> described a bloody night. The IDF later said it had withheld the bodies of the five men killed, claiming they were \u201cmembers of the Hamas cell\u201d.<\/p>\n Onlookers gather in the aftermath of the raid in Aqabat Jabr by Israeli forces. Photograph: Ahmad Gharabli\/AFP\/Getty Images<\/p>\n A week later, according to official sources, Dawas was arrested by the Palestinian Authority on suspicion of collaborating with Israel. He was released from prison in April due to a lack of evidence and returned to the camp, where people no longer trusted him.<\/p>\n \u201cSome men grabbed him in the street and tortured him for hours,\u201d Shalwn says. \u201cThey told him to leave Jericho and never come back. If he did, they said they would kill him.\u201d<\/p>\n Faction members in Jericho contacted by the Guardian corroborated key details of Dawas\u2019s life. All of them described him as a traitor and a source of shame for the Aqabat Jabr camp.<\/p>\n The fate of Palestinians suspected of working with Israeli intelligence is often uncertain. In Dawas\u2019s case, his community had never obtained definitive proof of his involvement \u2013 a fact that, some say, may have saved his life. As for the Israelis, once a collaborator is exposed within their community, they are typically moved to an undisclosed location.<\/p>\n \u201cUsually they are relocated inside Israel,\u201d said Hillel Cohen, a professor at the Department of Islam and Middle East Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. \u201cAn agency of Ministry of Defence helps them find a job and rent an apartment for several years with the hope they would build a new life outside the occupied territories. They are paid some money by the national insurance.\u201d<\/p>\n At this point in the story, the trail of the suspected Palestinian collaborator goes cold. For a year, no one heard from him.<\/p>\n Then in May 2024, with the Gaza war seven months old, Hamas claimed its fighters had lured Israeli troops into a tunnel in Jabaliya and killed and captured them<\/a>, which Israel denied. The group later published video of a bloodied body in military uniform and images of seized military equipment.<\/p>\n It was Dawas. It is not possible to know if he was in a tunnel, or if so, why, but his identity was clear to those who had known him.<\/p>\n \u201cPeople in the camp recognised him and tried to storm his family home,\u201d Shalwn said. \u201cHis mother and brother came to me for help, and I urged them to issue a statement disowning him to prevent reprisals.\u201d<\/p>\n That statement came the next day. \u201cWe affirm that what he has done does not represent us in any way, and has nothing to do with our morals or our national and religious principles,\u201d Dawas\u2019s family said.<\/p>\n![\"Unverified](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/352.jpg\")
Unverified social media image of Khalil Dawas.<\/p>\n