On Tuesday 14 October, Hamas handed over four bodies to Israel as part of an exchange of the dead under the US-brokered Gaza ceasefire.
Israeli forensic experts soon confirmed the identities of three of the bodies, but they said that one did not belong to them. Hamas insisted that the fourth man was an Israeli soldier.
“It’s one of yours,” the Palestinian militant group is said to have replied.
In a way, they may both have been right.
The body was that of Khalil Dawas, a Palestinian from Jericho suspected of working with Israeli forces. His story – like so many in the shadows of this conflict – is tangled in contradictions, grey zones, secrecy and betrayal.
The Guardian spoke to residents of Jericho’s Aqabat Jabr refugee camp, including Palestinian fighters who said Dawas had been among them before, they said, turning informant. The accounts offer a glimpse of how IDF units enter Palestinian towns and enlist or pressure locals – through threats or money – to sustain the intelligence machinery of the occupation.
Israeli officials were also approached for comment.
Dawas’s story begins in the city of Jabaliya in Gaza, where he was born and raised. Later, like many other Palestinian families, his parents decided to move to the West Bank, settling in the village of Tell near Nablus.
“They were a modest household with five children,” said Naser Shalwn, head of Aqabat Jabr camp and a board member of the Palestinian Prisoners’ Club advocacy group. “They moved here in 2014 and bought a small home.”
Dawas, then in his 20s, joined one of the Palestinian factions. Shalwn said he did not know which one, noting that although about 70% of the camp’s residents supported Fatah, other groups – including Islamic Jihad and Hamas – were also present.
The same year, he was arrested along with his brother, and, said Shalwn, “like many here he spent several years in prison”.
Dawas spent six and a half years in total in Israeli prisons after two arrests, according to Shalwn. The Palestinian prisoners ministry, part of the Palestinian Authority, told Israeli media his last period in jail had been in 2020, when he was held in Ofer for six months without charge in administrative detention.
Sources inside the camp suggest that his recruitment as a collaborator for the Israelis may have taken place during those six months.
Since 1967, Israel has run a vast intelligence network in the occupied territories, relying heavily on Palestinian collaborators. Coercion is often used as a tactic to recruit Palestinians, including pressure over work permits. According to former members of the military spy agency Unit 8200, the mining of private data from phones and emails can also expose personal information that the Israeli intelligence community can exploit. Much of this leverage is exerted in Israeli prisons, where detainees are especially vulnerable.
Like most stories involving collaborators – riddled with questions that never find answers – the reason Dawas went from being detained by the Israelis to being believed to be cooperating with them remains a mystery.
A 2014 investigation by the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth quoted a Unit 8200 dissident describing the many pressures used to force Palestinians to inform: “If you’re a homosexual who knows someone who knows a wanted man – Israel will turn your life into a misery,” he said.
Those with secrets or urgent medical needs could also find their lives “made a misery” until they provide intelligence on wanted relatives.
According to several faction members in Jericho, Dawas changed after his release, with camp residents beginning to notice unusual behaviour.
“He started selling bullets,” Shalwn says. “He sold a box of ammunition in the camp for 200 shekels, when it normally cost 1,500. And that was something that began to alarm members of the resistance.”
Bullet smugglers in the West Bank are often perceived as ambiguous figures. Israeli authorities sometimes use them as informants, allowing ammunition sales to proceed so the IDF can track buyers and identify suspected militants.
“The community of Aqabat Jabr began to doubt him,” says Shalwn. “Dawas was asking unusual questions, and suspicion grew. An Israeli raid on the camp in early 2023 turned those suspicions into certainty,” he claimed.
On 6 February 2023, after more than a week under siege, Israeli forces raided the Aqabat Jabr refugee camp and killed at least five Palestinian men. Video from the IDF showed a large-scale assault in the darkness before dawn and witnesses later interviewed by Reuters described a bloody night. The IDF later said it had withheld the bodies of the five men killed, claiming they were “members of the Hamas cell”.
A week later, according to official sources, Dawas was arrested by the Palestinian Authority on suspicion of collaborating with Israel. He was released from prison in April due to a lack of evidence and returned to the camp, where people no longer trusted him.
“Some men grabbed him in the street and tortured him for hours,” Shalwn says. “They told him to leave Jericho and never come back. If he did, they said they would kill him.”
Faction members in Jericho contacted by the Guardian corroborated key details of Dawas’s life. All of them described him as a traitor and a source of shame for the Aqabat Jabr camp.
The fate of Palestinians suspected of working with Israeli intelligence is often uncertain. In Dawas’s case, his community had never obtained definitive proof of his involvement – a fact that, some say, may have saved his life. As for the Israelis, once a collaborator is exposed within their community, they are typically moved to an undisclosed location.
“Usually they are relocated inside Israel,” said Hillel Cohen, a professor at the Department of Islam and Middle East Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. “An agency of Ministry of Defence helps them find a job and rent an apartment for several years with the hope they would build a new life outside the occupied territories. They are paid some money by the national insurance.”
At this point in the story, the trail of the suspected Palestinian collaborator goes cold. For a year, no one heard from him.
Then in May 2024, with the Gaza war seven months old, Hamas claimed its fighters had lured Israeli troops into a tunnel in Jabaliya and killed and captured them, which Israel denied. The group later published video of a bloodied body in military uniform and images of seized military equipment.
It was Dawas. It is not possible to know if he was in a tunnel, or if so, why, but his identity was clear to those who had known him.
“People in the camp recognised him and tried to storm his family home,” Shalwn said. “His mother and brother came to me for help, and I urged them to issue a statement disowning him to prevent reprisals.”
That statement came the next day. “We affirm that what he has done does not represent us in any way, and has nothing to do with our morals or our national and religious principles,” Dawas’s family said.
His body remained in Gaza for more than a year. When Hamas in October this year returned the bodies of what it said were four Israeli troops, tests carried out at Tel Aviv’s National Center of Forensic Medicine could only confirm the identities of three – Col Asaf Hamami, Capt Omer Maxim Neutra and Staff Sergeant Oz Daniel, all of whom were killed on 7 October 2023. A security official later confirmed the remains of the fourth were that of a Palestinian.
Hamas maintained that Dawas had been wearing an Israeli uniform, with a senior official telling Al Jazeera the body “belonged to a soldier taken by the Qassam Brigades”, the group’s military wing.
“A few days later, the family called me,” Shalwn said. “They said the Israelis had offered to return Khalil’s body – and they refused.”
A Palestinian Authority official from the Jericho governorate told the Guardian: “People in the camp said that accepting and burying the body would only encourage others to follow his path. So he will not be accepted, dead or alive.”
In Palestinian society, alleged collaborators face deep stigma: families may forgo public funerals for fear of reprisals, and officials can delay or restrict burials to prevent unrest. “I heard of cases where the officials of the graveyards refused to bury collaborators, and other cases where bodies were taken out of graves and burnt,” said Cohen, a specialist in Jewish-Arab relations.
The Guardian approached Dawas’s brother several times. Despite repeated attempts, he refused to speak.
Investigating the lives of collaborators rarely leads anywhere: it is a subject shrouded in silence, awkward for Israel and fraught with shame for Palestinians.
“Israelis tend not to speak about collaborators, both for security reasons or because there was use of dubious methods in their recruiting or handling,” Cohen said. “Palestinians tend to detach themselves from the phenomenon and from collaborators as individuals.”
Israel’s Shin Bet security agency and the IDF both declined to comment for this story.
Speaking on condition of anonymity, a brigadier general in the Palestinian Authority’s security services told the Guardian: “What he [Dawas] did is unacceptable. He is a disgrace for all the Palestinians.”
To this day, no one knows where Dawas’s remains lie.
