Hours after Hamas gunmen executed 18 Palestinians suspected of collaborating with Israel in Gaza earlier on Friday, the Facebook page which first provided photographs of the executions say more such killings are expected soon.
The Palestinian Facebook page posted a photograph of a mosque in Gaza City, where a crowd stood and waited in anticipation of more executions.
Earlier Friday, Hamas security forces killed 11 suspected collaborators at a Gaza police station. Shortly afterward Hamas killed seven more Palestinians in a public execution in a central Gaza square on Friday, witnesses and a Hamas website said.
The victims, their heads covered and hands tied, were shot dead by masked gunmen dressed in black in front of a crowd of worshipers outside a mosque after prayers, witnesses and al-Majd, a pro-Hamas website, said.
In a sign of Hamas's increasing tight grip in the enclave following Israel's targeting killings of three of the group's senior commanders, nearly a dozen Palestinians were reportedly killed at the Jawazat installation in the Strip.
On Thursday, three other Palestinians suspected of collaboration with Israel were executed, according to Hamas-affiliated websites.
A senior Hamas security source was quoted as saying that those three, whose names were not released, were executed “after the completion of revolutionary procedures” against them.
The recent spate of arrests and executions for alleged collaboration with Israel comes as the IAF successfully struck and killed several high level commanders in the Gaza Strip, as well as an attempted assassination of the Hamas military wing's commander Mohammad Deif.
Among the commanders killed by Israeli airstrikes in recent days were Muhammad Abu Shamalah and Ra'ad Atar who were both involved in the 2006 kidnapping of Gilad Schalit.
Hours after the targeted strike on the Hamas commanders, Ismail Haniyeh, the former head of the Hamas regime in Gaza, released a statement that was read aloud by the Hamas television network.
Haniyeh said that Hamas “was saddened over the deaths of our brothers and commanders who went on the path of great ones," and that, “After a senior operative is killed, we immediately continue on our path without hesitating or stepping back.”
Hamas has claimed that Deif is still alive and was not in his home when the IAF bombed the house killing his wife and two of his children.
The three executed on Thursday were among seven suspected collaborators who were arrested while they were searching for targets in the Gaza Strip for Israel to attack, the source said.
It was not clear whether the remaining four suspected collaborators would also be executed.
The source claimed that Hamas and other “resistance groups” had uncovered several informants in the field and through “special intelligence techniques.”
The source called on residents of the Gaza Strip not to talk about the “resistance groups and their leaders, because the collaborators are looking for any piece of information to pass on to the enemy in light of pressure and threats by Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) officers.”
Sources in the Gaza Strip said that several suspected collaborators have been summarily executed by Hamas since the beginning of Operation Protective Edge.
Hamas security officers recently arrested a number of women on suspicion of passing on information to Israel about the movements of militiamen and the results of Israeli air strikes, they said.