Benjamin Netanyahu acknowledges that Israel supports a rival armed group to Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu acknowledged that his country is supporting an armed group in Gaza that rivals the Islamist movement Hamas, following comments by a former minister who suggested Israeli arms deliveries to the organization.

Israeli and Palestinian media have indicated that the Israeli-backed group is part of a Bedouin tribe led by Yasser Abu Shabab.

The European Council on Foreign Relations (EFCR), a European think tank, describes Abu Shabab as the leader of "a criminal gang operating in the Rafah area," in the southern Gaza Strip, and is "accused of looting aid trucks."

Israeli MP and former Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman told Kan TV that the government was "giving weapons to a group of criminals and felons" on the instructions of Prime Minister Netanyahu.

"What did Lieberman leak? That, following the advice of some security officials, we have activated clans in Gaza that oppose Hamas. And what's wrong with that? " Netanyahu said in a video posted on social media on Thursday.

"That's only good because it's saving the lives of Israeli soldiers," he argued.

Michael Milshtein, a Palestinian affairs expert at the Moshe Dayan Center in Tel Aviv, told AFP that the Abu Shabab clan is part of a Bedouin tribe spread across the border between Gaza and Egypt's Sinai Peninsula.

Some members of that tribe, he said, have been involved "in all kinds of criminal activities, like drug trafficking and things like that."

Milshtein added that Abu Shabab was imprisoned for a time in Gaza , and that his clan leaders recently denounced him as "a collaborator" with Israel.

"Apparently, either the Shabak (Israeli security agency) or the army thought it would be a fantastic idea to turn this militia, which is actually a criminal gang, into an ally, providing it with weapons, money, and shelter" from Israeli military operations, Milshtein said.

The expert pointed out that Hamas killed four members of that group several days ago.

Israel often accuses Hamas, with whom it has been at war for 20 months, of looting aid from humanitarian trucks entering Gaza.

Hamas, in turn, claims that the Bedouin clan has opted for "betrayal and robbery," and asserted that it has evidence of "clear coordination between these bands of looters, collaborators of the (Israeli) occupation, and the enemy's own army, in looting aid and fabricating humanitarian crises that aggravate the suffering " of the Palestinians.

The Popular Forces , as the Abu Shabab group calls itself, denied on Facebook that it had ever been "a tool of the Israeli occupation."