Hamas Executes One of Its Leaders - Then Blames Israel

by Khaled Abu Toameh • August 8, 2014 at 5:00 am

Sources in the Gaza Strip said on Thursday that Taha was executed because Hamas feared he might implicate some of its leaders in many corruption scandals. "The man knew too much abut the senior leaders of Hamas."

The international media, for its part, will simply endorse the Hamas story because it is more convenient to blame Israel than to get into trouble with a radical Islamist movement that carries out extra-judicial executions.

Prominent Hamas leader Ayman Taha during a November 2012 television interview. (Image source: photo credit: YouTube video screenshot)

Militiamen on Thursday dumped the bullet-riddled body of Ayman Taha, a former prominent Hamas figure, outside Gaza City's Shifa Hospital.

The body remained on the ground for nearly an hour before other militiamen came back and took it to an unknown destination.

Palestinians who were at the hospital were too afraid to remove the body.

A few hours later, Taha's body was handed over to Shifa Hospital by a number of Hamas militiamen.

Palestinian journalists said that Taha had been executed for spying on behalf of an Arab intelligence service and involvement in financial corruption.

According to the journalists, Taha was executed by a firing squad three days ago. They said that he died instantly of gunshots to the head and chest.

Hamas's armed wing, Izaddin al-Qassam, arrested Taha in 2013 on suspicion that he had served as an informant for the Egyptian General Intelligence Service.

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