GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip — He walked in silence, looking at houses and examining doors, holding something in his hand. He placed it on the wall of one of the houses, looked up and saw a woman watching him from the fourth floor. He walked away quickly, looking guilty, and broke into a run. The woman began to scream, alerting some neighborhood youths, who grabbed him and found a SIM card on him with an Israeli number. They took him in and handed him over to the security services.

According to one woman whose house was bombed by the occupying forces in the city of Rafah, in the south of the Gaza Strip, this was enough to determine this mysterious man a spy for the Israeli military. Standing in front of her demolished home, she told Al-Monitor, “I saw him do that a few hours before our house was hit — everything confirms that he is an Israeli spy. He moved alone when the streets were empty and put signals on houses.”

One young man from a family whose house in the Zeitoun neighborhood of Gaza was bombed by Israeli forces on the first day of the war told Al-Monitor, “I left the house in the middle of the night and saw, attached to the side of our house, a red light giving off some sort of signal. I wanted to try to break it, but my siblings warned me that it could explode.” He continued, “Not more than an hour had passed when our relatives in the area got a call from an Israeli number and a voice with a Gazan accent informed them that they needed to leave our house. It was bombed five minutes later.”

In the first week of the war, which began July 8, the resistance in the Gaza Strip announced that it had arrested a number of spies. It distributed notices of the execution of two of them — one in the Nasr neighborhood of Gaza City and the other in the city of Rafah in the south — throughout the streets of Gaza.