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Palestinian vigilantes apparently affiliated with the Hamas movement violated the core principles of international humanitarian law by attacking a hospital and killing two wounded men in custody who had been accused of collaborating with Israel, Human Rights Watch said today.

On Monday, gunmen carried out separate daylight attacks in Gaza City’s Shifa Hospital against Muhammad al-Sharif and Walid Hamdiya, who had been badly wounded earlier that morning in an attack on a prison run by the Palestinian Authority. In the earlier attack, one or more grenades were thrown into a cell-block housing accused collaborators. A third man, Musa Awda, died from wounds sustained in the grenade attack, which reportedly wounded seven people.

Hamas’s military wing, the ‘Izz al-Din al-Qassem Brigades,’ issued a statement justifying the attacks. According to some reports, a policeman stationed at the central prison carried out the attack there.

“These brutal executions go against the most fundamental tenets of international humanitarian law,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, executive director of Human Rights Watch’s Middle East and North Africa Division. “The assailants targeted two wounded men who were not engaged in combat, but were rather in custody without any means to defend themselves."

Al-Sharif and Hamdiya were serving prison sentences after being convicted of assisting Israeli forces in assassinating Palestinian militants in the 1990s. Accused collaborators are generally tried before a Higher State Security Court of the Palestinian Authority, a court which is neither independent nor impartial. Al-Sharif was convicted in 1999 for his alleged role in the 1995 assassination of a Qassem Brigades founder. Hamdiya had been detained since 1995 and reportedly confessed in a one-day trial in October 2002 of helping Israeli forces kill another Qassem Brigades founder in 1993 and other Hamas activists during 1987-1995.

“No crime, no matter how serious, can justify such brutal, cold-blooded murders committed by people taking the law into their own hands,” Whitson said.

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