By Kevin Barrett, for American Free Press

Israel is deliberately starving the people of Gaza. The first to die are those without financial means—and their children. A kilo of flour currently costs about $30, far beyond the reach of many Gazans.

People in Gaza are dying, and children are being crippled for life due to malnutrition, because Israel has closed border crossings and allowed only a trickle of food to enter. What little food is allowed into Gaza is being distributed not by traditional aid agencies, but by genocide-complicit outfits like the so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), a US-Israeli fake aid group that has repeatedly conspired with the Israeli military to lure starving Palestinians to food distribution points and then massacre them by gunfire.

But there are a few Palestinians who are allowed to receive food aid without being shot. Those are the ISIS-linked drug-dealing gangsters who work for Israel and help it carry out its genocide.

The “El Chapo” of Gaza is a thief and drug trafficker named Yasser Abu Shabab. According to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, Abu Shabab, godfather of the Hamasha crime family, is a lifelong mafiosi recruited by the Netanyahu government to create a Gaza branch of ISIS. Whistleblowing Israeli parliamentarian Avigdor Lieberman explains: “The Hamasha clan are in essence lawless criminals who in recent years wanted to give themselves an ideological angle or spin, so they became Salafi jihadists and began identifying with ISIS.”

Lieberman explained that Netanyahu’s government believes that these ISIS thugs will provide an Israel-friendly counterweight to Hamas, which dominates the legitimate government of Gaza. The lawmaker reminded Israelis that Hamas was itself created with Israeli support as a counterweight to the PLO—a decision that Israeli leaders came to regret. By creating and arming ISIS in Gaza, Lieberman suggested, Israel is asking for trouble: “Ultimately, these weapons will be turned against us.” Netanyahu responded: “On the advice of security officials, we activated clans in Gaza that oppose Hamas. What’s wrong with that?”

Abu Shabab’s Israeli-armed ISIS gang has been enriching itself by stealing food aid and reselling it on the black market. Gaza’s police and security forces are able to protect the aid during ceasefires, including the two month “Trump truce” that ended March 18. But when ceasefires expire, and Israel returns to its policy of wholesale massacres, home demolitions, and expulsions, the legitimate security forces become targets and have to go into hiding, leaving the field wide open for criminals like Abu Shabab. And when anyone tries to prevent the gangsters from looting and pillaging, Israeli forces intervene to protect the criminals.

Why would a supposedly Islamic extremist group like ISIS collaborate with Israel? The answer is that Wahhabis (followers of the radical 18^th-century cleric Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab) are indoctrinated to believe that they are the only people with the true religion, and all others are infidels worthy of being robbed and killed. That ideology is very convenient for bandits—like the Ibn Saud family of warlords who used Wahhabism, and British and American support, to massacre and subjugate normal Muslims and take over the Arabian peninsula. The Ibn Saud family, like Abu Shabab’s Hamasha clan, are basically thuggish, uncultured desert bandits who adopted Wahhabism to justify robbing and killing Muslim pilgrims en route to Mecca. Wahhabi brutality and hatred of normal Muslims was then weaponized by the British, and later by the US and Israel, to enable the West to gain control over Mideast oil resources by installing their Ibn Saud puppets and having them rule according to Wahhabi ideology. Today, the Israelis are in essence repeating that formula by deputizing Abu Shahab and ISIS to wreak havoc in Gaza.

The Israelis hope that by weaponizing thugs and criminals against the people of Gaza, they will sow divisions that will explode into gang warfare. As Gazans starve, and Israel’s hired gangsters steal the food and attack anyone who objects, the Israelis will try to blame Palestinian civil strife for the mass death and destruction. They hope to use their ISIS gangsters to herd genocide survivors out of Gaza and into Egypt.

But the Palestinian people are having none of it. The legitimate government of Gaza, elected by the people (and dominated by Hamas) has set up an “Arrow Unit” to take down the ISIS gangsters. Most of the people of Gaza support the resistance, which includes not only Hamas but also several allied groups. They have no use for criminals who collaborate with the genocidal Israelis.

Likewise, most of the people of the region support the legitimate resistance and loathe ISIS and other Wahhabi gangsters. And they recognize that Iran supports them in their struggles against Israel and ISIS, the two genocidal terrorist entities that are laying waste to the region.