Hamas authorities in the Gaza Strip executed three Palestinian men for murder on Tuesday, the attorney general said, drawing condemnation from the United Nations. The three, who were not named and whose cases were unrelated, were put to death by firing squad behind closed doors, security sources said. The Palestinian Center for Human Rights (PCHR) said, however, that two of them were hanged and the third was shot.
"To achieve public deterrence and curb crime, the competent authorities carried out at dawn on Tuesday, May 31, 2016 execution rulings against three of those convicted of shocking murders," a statement from the attorney general said. Rupert Colville, spokesman for the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, condemned the executions which he said occurred "despite serious and widespread concerns that international fair trial standards were not respected". The European Union, Human Rights Watch (HRW) and Amnesty International all also condemned the killings.
In theory, all execution orders in the Palestinian territories must be approved by president Mahmud Abbas, who is based in the occupied West Bank. But Hamas, the militant Islamist group that runs Gaza, no longer recognises his legitimacy, and Gaza attorney general Ismail Jaber recently announced that the authorities there would carry out the executions without Abbas's backing. Hamas and Abbas's Palestinian Authority agreed a unity deal in April 2014 which was supposed to lead to a joint technocratic government, but the accord was never fully implemented and they remain at loggerheads.