JERUSALEM -- The human-rights group Amnesty International said Wednesday that Hamas, the Palestinian Islamist militant organization that controls the Gaza Strip, used the cover of last summer's war with Israel to abduct, torture and carry out extrajudicial killings with impunity.
The 50-day war left large areas of Gaza in ruins and thousands dead.
In a report, Amnesty International said the killing of Palestinians alleged to have collaborated with Israel constituted war crimes. The group also extended blame beyond Hamas to include the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority, saying it failed to stop or investigate the killings.
Also Wednesday, Israeli warplanes hit five targets in the Gaza Strip in response to rocket fire from the coastal enclave. No serious injuries on either side were reported.
Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon warned Hamas that Gaza "will pay a heavy price" if rocket fire from the territory escalates.
Israel and Hamas-affiliated social media reported that the rocket fire from Gaza late Tuesday, which landed near the seaside city of Ashdod in southern Israel, probably came from the group Islamic Jihad, a Gaza-based Palestinian militia.
"Hamas better restrain any attempts to open fire toward Israel or provoke it. Otherwise we will have to act more forcefully," Yaalon said.
The Amnesty report describes Hamas forces targeting Palestinians suspected of assisting Israel and subjecting at least 23 people to extrajudicial killings.
The report noted that some of those killed during the war had been arrested months or even years earlier. Those formally charged or convicted of collaboration with the enemy faced military courts and tribunals "whose proceedings are unfair and fail to respect due process," the report said.
Six of those men were paraded in front of a mosque in Gaza City after Friday prayers Aug. 22, 2014. They were hooded and bound and forced on their knees. As the crowd watched, a person with a gun fired a bullet into each man's head. The men were then shot in the torsos by rounds from an AK-47 assault rifle.
The killers hung signs on the bodies alleging the men had "provided information to the enemy about the locations of guards, tunnels, explosive devices, and homes of fighters, rockets which the occupation bombed and which resulted in many martyrs from resistance fighters."
Salah al-Bardaweel, the spokesman of Hamas in Gaza City, called the report "unjust and unfair" and questioned Amnesty's motivations, in part because it had "Israeli employees."
The spokesman also deflected responsibility toward other Palestinian factions.
"The report focused on Hamas only because it is the biggest enemy of Israel," he said.
The Amnesty report also confirmed that Hamas security forces from its Interior Ministry were using an outpatient clinic at Shifa Hospital in Gaza City "to detain, interrogate, torture and otherwise ill-treat suspects, even as other parts of the hospital continued to function as a medical center."
This was the hospital where thousands of Palestinians wounded in Israeli attacks were treated during the war and where Hamas officials gave media interviews condemning what they called Israeli aggression.
In briefings during and after the war, Israeli military commanders said Hamas was using patients and staff members at its central hospital as "human shields" to protect command-and-control centers from airstrikes.
Amnesty International also asserted that "three men died in custody in suspicious circumstances just a few days after they were arrested and tortured."
Amnesty said detainees were tortured -- in a bid to induce "confessions" -- with methods that included being "beaten with truncheons, gun butts, hoses, wire, and fists; some were also burnt with fire, hot metal or acid."
In a statement, Hamas said it had "no connection with killings" documented in the report. Instead, it blamed Israel for recruiting collaborators, who Hamas suggested were prisoners who fled their cells when the facilities were attacked. Hamas also said families of those killed in Israeli raids took part in "revenge killings."
Amnesty International said it has been unable to send a delegation to the Gaza Strip since the war and so carried out its research "remotely, supported by a fieldworker based in Gaza."
The Palestinian Authority and Hamas continue their months-long standoff over who should administer civil and security affairs in the territory. This has led donor governments to withhold the billions of dollars pledged to rebuild the war-ravaged strip.
A Section on 05/28/2015