On this date last year, in the midst of Israel’s bloody incursion, Gaza’s Hamas government executed Palestinian journalist and human rights activist Haidar Ghanem as an Israeli spy.
Ghanem was the best-publicized of a number of Israeli collaborators to suffer that fate during the one-sided, three-week war.
“He was taken to an abandoned building in southern Gaza and shot to death,” a Palestinian source said. “Others were executed the same way.”
The Rafah resident had actually been a minor cause celebre back in 2002, when the Palestinian Authority condemned him to death for pinpointing Fatah activists for assassination by Israeli security, for which assignment he was supposedly recruited in the 1990’s while working as a field researcher for the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem. International pressure got him released.
The Jerusalem Post reported that Ghanem confessed (as he had in the 2002 case) to the charges.
On this day..
- 1959: Col. Cornelio Rojas
- 1829: William Maxwell, the last hanged for sodomy by the Royal Navy
- 1528: Augustin and Christoph Perwanger
- 1755: Henri Mongeot, Lescombat assassin
- 1859: William Burgess
- 2015: Ahmed Ali and Ghulam Shabbir, Pakistan terrorists
- 1355: Ines de Castro, posthumous queen
- 1889: Alfred Schaeffer, diabolical dynamiter, lynched near Seattle
- 1612: John Selman, Christmas cutpurse
- 1611: Three accomplices of Elizabeth Báthory, the Countess of Blood
- 1898: Theodore Durrant, the Demon of the Belfry
- 2007: 23 Shia hostages