GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip — On May 2, the Islamic Jihad’s military wing, Al-Quds Brigades, released a video claiming to show that it had raided a number of drug stashes and seized large quantities of the narcotic Tramadol in Rafah, in southern Gaza. Tramadol is an opioid painkiller that has become popular in Gaza over the past nine years and has been smuggled through tunnels on the Egyptian-Gaza border.

The video shows a group of men in civilian clothes, their faces blurred, digging up packets of Tramadol. Al-Quds Brigades claim on their website, Military Media, that they seized 175,000 tablets of the drug. An unnamed official from the brigades’ security division in southern Gaza told Military Media on May 3 that the Tramadol raid was “within the framework of the fight against a deviant class of drug dealers, with dead consciences, trying to push our youth into the unknown.”

The official also said, “We felt responsible toward our people, and this is why we started conducting several raids targeting these dealers’ dens. We were able to seize this huge amount of drugs after a long and complicated operation executed by the control, investigation and seizure units affiliated with al-Quds Brigades’ security apparatus.” He stressed that the brigade’s role ended with the seized drugs being handed over to the Palestinian police.

Mohammed Abu Hashem, a legal researcher from the democratic development unit at the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, noted that official, state bodies are responsible for law enforcement, under the official judicial authorities, the public prosecution and attorney general. “We respect the Islamic Jihad and its position as a faction of the resistance, but it is not an official body that has the right to exercise judicial authority,” Abu Hashem told Al-Monitor. “Thus, the [brigades’] action is considered an infringement of the rule of law and opens the door to taking the law into their own hands, instead of being limited to the official frameworks.”