Hamas is a genocidal terrorist organization committed to Israel’s destruction. But some of its foremost victims aren’t Israeli Jews. Rather, they’re Arab. And a newly formed group, the Arrow Unit, exemplifies how Hamas maintains its grip on power, even now, nearly two years into one of the worst wars the Middle East has seen in decades.

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On Aug. 25, an Israeli strike on Nasser Hospital in Gaza killed several people. The strike received widespread coverage in the corporate media. The usual suspects — the New York Times, the United Nations, and a host of foreign-funded nongovernmental organizations — condemned the Jewish state. Yet most failed to note the hospital’s long-standing use as a base for Hamas operations. 

The terrorist group has used hospitals to shelter munitions and operatives, as command centers, even to hide many of the more than 200 people Hamas took hostage when it invaded Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, perpetrating the largest slaughter of Jewish civilians since the Holocaust. Nasser Hospital, located in Khan Younis, was no exception.

Indeed, in late June 2025, the hospital was the scene of a clash between the Arrow Unit, one of Hamas’s most feared but little-known detachments, and a Palestinian clan. The Arrow Unit has received scant attention from the Western press. But it is key to Hamas’s maintaining its hold on Gaza.

Hamas’s Ministry of Interior formed the Arrow Unit in late 2024. According to the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank, the group was “ostensibly created to act as law enforcement” but, since it began operating, has instead “carried out public beatings, shootings and executions of Palestinians who are deemed to be criminals or colluding with Israel.” 

According to Joe Truzman, a senior analyst with the FDD, the Arrow Unit’s membership is drawn from multiple sources in Gaza, including police officers, operatives belonging to the Ministry of Interior’s security branches, fighters belonging to terrorist factions, and civilian volunteers. Maj. Gen. Mahmoud Salah, a former Hamas police chief, reportedly played a central role in the unit’s formation before he was killed in an Israeli strike in early 2025. 

The unit has largely flown under the radar, overlooked by major press outlets and the policymakers they influence. Truzman and the FDD are among a mere handful of experts and organizations that have profiled the group. 

There is evidence of unit hierarchy and organization. Like Hamas and other Palestinian terrorist organizations, the group typically operates in civilian attire, enabling members to blend in and escape detection. And while no official figures on manpower exist, “the unit’s operational tempo and its ability to publicize activities online point to a force of at least several dozen, potentially reaching into the low hundreds,” of members, Truzman said.

The purpose of the Arrow Unit is clear: to instill fear in Palestinians in Gaza. Fear, after all, is an essential tool for all autocrats, and Hamas is no exception.

Accordingly, the group maintains an active online presence, including a Telegram channel, which it uses to document its reign of terror. Information operations and psychological warfare are a key component of modern war — and arguably nowhere is this truer than in the Israel-Islamist conflict. Consequently, the unit’s members film themselves torturing and executing Palestinians. Batons, sticks, pipes, and small arms are among their favorite weapons. They target Palestinians in Gaza who post images that run counter to Hamas’s information operations. If, for example, a Palestinian posts that chicken is readily available, thus contradicting the myth of a “famine” pushed by Hamas and its sympathizers, that person can expect threats and even retribution from the unit.

The group also publishes names of Palestinians accused of various “crimes,” including working with Israel or expressing any sign of dissent or criticism. For example, it allegedly shattered the limbs of a Palestinian in Gaza named Ahmed Muhammad al Masry for holding up a sign that said, “Hamas does not represent us.” The unit has been at the center of efforts to quash the anti-Hamas protests that have periodically broken out in Gaza in recent months. 

The Arrow Unit acts as “judge, jury, and executioner,” Truzman noted. And its value to Hamas “lies less in its size and more in its function as an instrument of control.” The group “projects Hamas’s capacity to police Gaza despite the devastation of war and the erosion of formal governance structures,” he added. And by “presenting itself as a deterrent against criminality, the unit bolsters Hamas’s claim to legitimacy as the sole provider of order in a lawless environment.” 

Yet the unit also targets dissenters and those, including various clans, some backed by Israel, that dare to defy Hamas’s rule. That is, the group enables Hamas to be both arsonist and firefighter, enhancing its control and reach into the lives of average, everyday Palestinians in Gaza. The Arrow Unit is “integral to Hamas’s survival strategy,” Truzman told me. “In a context where Palestinian frustration is mounting against Hamas, the unit embodies the Islamist group’s message that no alternative authority can guarantee either justice or security.”

But the Western media have largely ignored the group. The Washington Post, the New York Times, National Public Radio, and others have failed to detail its activities fully. Indeed, as the Center for Peace Communications documented, some “journalists” might even be aiding Hamas’s campaign of internal repression. On Sept. 2, the center published a report in the Free Press, based on interviews with dissident Palestinians in Gaza, which alleged that Al Jazeera staff have worked with Hamas to suppress dissent. Hamas, the report said, even controls hiring at the network’s Gaza bureau. Al Jazeera employees even reportedly work with the terrorist group to identify protesters. 

Compromises are often inherent to reporting from war zones. Many journalists don’t want to lose access and are subject to coercion and intimidation that can influence their reporting. But the center’s allegations are of another type. And they’ve been largely ignored by legacy media.

On the one hand, the selective outrage is unsurprising. As the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis documented, the press are often participants, not merely neutral observers, in the Israel-Islamist conflict. They prefer to depict Israel as solely responsible for all ills while depriving Palestinians of independent agency. This narrative has taken center stage over a far more complicated and interesting reality. 

The formation of the Arrow Unit is directly linked to the present war against Hamas and other Gaza-based terrorist groups. But the rise of the unit hints at another long-standing, if widely ignored, fact: Palestinian history has always been riven with internecine battles. And targeting, torturing, and murdering political opponents, rivals, and critics have marked the conflict since its beginning. In fact, they are inseparable from it.

In the hours and days after the Oct. 7 massacre, pro-Hamas demonstrators took to Western streets and college campuses to express their support for the terrorist group. Many chanted, “Long live the intifada,” an Arabic word that translates to “uprising” or “shaking off.” While some Hamas apologists have portrayed the word as benign, its real meaning is undeniably violent — and not just for Israelis. The so-called Second Intifada took place from 2000 to 2005 and was a terror campaign in which Palestinian groups murdered and wounded more than 1,000 Israelis. The previous intifada occurred from 1987 to 1990. But what is arguably the First Intifada, also known as the Arab Revolt, actually took place from 1936 to 1939, a decade before Israel’s birth. And it proved to be a seminal moment, both for the Israel-Islamist conflict and for Palestinian history.

At the time, Arab politics in British-ruled Mandatory Palestine were dominated by Amin al Husseini. The British had seized the territory from the Ottoman Empire during World War I. In 1917, the British government issued the Balfour Declaration, which called for the establishment of a “national home” for the Jewish people in their ancestral homeland. Yet many Arabs, and not a few of the British military authorities tasked with its implementation, opposed the declaration. Leading Arab agitators, Husseini among them, fomented anti-Jewish violence, hoping to sway British opinion away from creating a Jewish state. 

In spite of Husseini’s role in leading a pogrom in Jerusalem in 1920, British authorities made Husseini the grand mufti of Jerusalem, the leading Muslim cleric in the land. Later, Husseini was also made head of the Supreme Muslim Council, a newly created position, giving him tremendous patronage power. Husseini was only 26, and he lacked the bona fides and gravitas for these positions. Yet he came from one of Jerusalem’s leading Arab families, and Mandatory Palestine authorities may have hoped to convert the hard-liner. For these reasons, and perhaps in recognition of his wartime service as a spy and recruiter for the British, Mandatory Palestine head Herbert Samuel chose Husseini over other, more qualified candidates. It was a fateful choice.

Husseini continued to amass power. And he continued to thwart official British policy. In 1929, he sparked massacres throughout British-ruled Mandatory Palestine, leading to no fewer than 133 Jews being murdered. Once again, British authorities gave Husseini a pass. In 1933, Husseini reached out to the newly elected German leader, Adolf Hitler, expressing his admiration. By the mid-1930s, however, Husseini’s influence was dimming. 

Husseini had proven stunningly corrupt. As Yardena Schwartz noted in her recent book Ghosts of a Holy War, Husseini used Supreme Muslim Council money to build a “luxurious hotel” in Jerusalem. He used his offices to pocket funds and hire family members and sycophants. He also had a credibility problem, and it didn’t stem purely from his standing as a British appointee.

The Husseini clan, like many other leading Arab families in the area, sold land to the very Zionists they claimed to despise. For example, the mufti’s father, Tahir, had tried to block Jewish immigration and land purchases and called for new Jewish arrivals to be “terrorized.” Yet, as Schwartz notes, “he also sold land to Jews in Jerusalem.” This mix of hypocrisy and corruption, combined with the failure to stop growing Jewish immigration in the 1930s, weakened Husseini’s popularity with the discontented masses.

Sheikh Izz ad Din al Qassam, a Muslim cleric born in what is today Syria, represented the first real threat. Qassam was a jihadist and had already waged war against Italians in Libya. In 1931, he formed the Black Hand, a terrorist group, which “waged a series of deadly attacks over the next four years, terrorizing Jewish farms and kibbutzim, and destroying British-constructed railways and telephone lines.” Husseini attempted to ply him with patronage, appointing him imam of a new mosque, but the cleric’s burgeoning following augured poorly for Husseini’s grip on power. 

Qassam provided military training to “peasants and men who had been released from prison in the wake of the 1929 riots” that Husseini had instigated. In 1935, Qassam and two of his followers ambushed a group of British Mandate policemen, murdering a Jewish sergeant. Shortly thereafter, the terrorist chieftain was killed by police, becoming a “hero” and “legend” to many Arabs living in the area, Schwartz observed. Qassam’s popularity represented a shift in Mandate Arab politics, signaling discontent with the status quo. Tellingly, both Hamas and Fatah, the two dominant Palestinian movements today, have rockets and brigades named in Qassam’s honor. 

The grand mufti had never lacked for opponents. Historically, the Nashashibi family was the chief rival to the Husseinis. One British Mandate official, Douglas Duff, “likened the contest between the powerful Nashashibi and Husseini clans to the Montagues and Capulets, only with more hatred,” Schwartz observed. According to Duff: “Murders, tree-cutting, vine-uprooting, the burning of crops and olive trees in the villages, all most heinous crimes in a land dependent on these things, were carried out in the name of the great feud.” When Husseini campaigned to be appointed grand mufti, he was opposed by Raghib al Nashashibi, the mayor of Jerusalem. 

The First Intifada emerged in the wake of Qassam’s death. While it is largely remembered today as an Arab revolt against British rule, it was also marked by internecine violence, with Husseini using it as an opportunity to consolidate control and murder those who threatened his rule.

The mufti fled Mandatory Palestine but continued to orchestrate terrorism from his initial base of operations in Beirut. Those Arabs who dared to cooperate with British efforts to restore peace faced death at the hands of his henchmen. As the historian Oren Kessler documents, Husseini’s Arab Higher Committee even placed posters with instructions to “kill every Arab” who cooperated with a British commission of inquiry. Lists of “traitors” were posted in mosques. The vice mayor of Jerusalem, Hassan Sidqi Dajani, had initially intended to testify before the commission, “but thought twice after receiving a note” from Husseini’s associates “advising he bring a burial shroud,” Kessler writes.

Husseini’s penchant for murdering opponents was detailed in an open letter, “A Voice from the Graves of Arab Palestine,” published by Fakhri Nashashibi, a young leader in the anti-mufti camp. The letter, Kessler notes, held Husseini “responsible for the deaths of thousands of fellow Arabs,” yet “anyone who dared raise his voice was killed, cowed into praise, or compelled to flee the country.” Nashashibi told a foreign press gathering in Jerusalem: “One day, every Arab in Palestine will be able to speak freely, but not if the mufti is allowed to return.”

The British eventually adopted harsh measures to end the revolt. Some authorities used Arab prisoners as “minesweepers” to detect if any mines had been laid near railroad tracks. As Kessler points out, village residents were “routinely placed in open-air cages while their homes were searched” and “house demolitions became commonplace.” Kessler notes that the final toll for the so-called revolt was “withering,” with 500 Jews killed and 1,000 wounded, along with 250 British fatalities. “But the most onerous price of all was paid by the Arabs themselves,” with at least 5,000, perhaps more than 8,000, dead, “of whom at least 1,500 likely fell at Arab hands.”

During World War II, Husseini became a Nazi collaborator, broadcasting propaganda into the Arab world, touring death camps with his friend Heinrich Himmler, recruiting SS divisions, and hatching a plot to poison Tel Aviv’s water supply. And he continued to orchestrate campaigns of terrorism and repression from abroad. In 1951, Husseini’s associates murdered one of his foremost rivals, King Abdullah of Jordan.

Husseini’s successor of sorts, his distant cousin Yasser Arafat, also resorted to murder and intimidation. Arafat led the Fatah movement and was the head of the Palestine Liberation Organization, a sometimes unwieldy umbrella group of various Palestinian factions, ranging from outright Marxist to avowedly Islamist and everything in between. As the late historian Barry Rubin documented in his biography of Arafat, the Palestinian leader used a variety of methods, both buying off and burying his opponents. 

WHY ISRAEL’S STRIKE ON HAMAS LEADERS IN QATAR MATTERS 

Nonetheless, just as the British elevated Husseini some 70 years prior, the United States made Arafat the head of the newly created Palestinian Authority in the 1990s. The PA was born out of the Oslo peace process, which gave Palestinians the opportunity for limited self-rule in the West Bank and Gaza in exchange for promises to renounce terrorism and recognize Israel. But Arafat’s promises were empty. Shortly after returning from his exile in Tunisia, Arafat launched a campaign of terrorism against Israel and his own people. The U.N., among others, later concluded that the newly created Palestinian Authority Security Force had “abused and, in some cases, tortured” Palestinians and had “committed a number of serious human rights abuses.” One of Arafat’s security chiefs, Jibril Rajoub, was later sued in American courts for the alleged kidnapping, torture, and murder of Azzam Rahim, a Palestinian American, in 1995. Arafat’s successor, current PA President Mahmoud Abbas, has banished and imprisoned opponents and critics. In 2016, the PA’s then-Prime Minister Rami Hamdallah admitted that “torture happens” in PA prisons. 

In Palestinian politics, when it comes to perpetrating acts of violence against their own people, Hamas and its Arrow Unit are the rule, not the exception. That many in the media have ignored the unit’s rise is an indictment. But it also goes far in explaining how such repression has continued, in one form or another, for nearly a century. 

Sean Durns is a senior research analyst for CAMERA, the 65,000-member, Boston-based Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis.