Ali Shaath, the chief commissioner of the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza, threw stones at Israeli soldiers alongside Palestinian youth he worked with, he admitted during an interview with Ahmad Biqawi in April 2025.
Around seven minutes into the nearly two-hour interview, Shaath said, “I worked with the youth at school in demonstrations against the Israeli occupation. We would stand in areas where there were occupation checkpoints and their posts, and we would throw stones at them so they would leave our town.”
“I actually was the organizer of this activity or this national act in the city of Khan Yunis [in the Gaza Strip]. I succeeded in awakening all the opinions and feelings of the people, and they set out to the occupation’s positions,” he said.
Without confirming his age at the time of the incident, only saying he was “still young,” Shaath told his interviewer he was sentenced for the stone-throwing attacks. He said he was later imprisoned again, resulting in him needing to resit his degree, but he did not give a reason for the detainment.
The IDF recognizes stone throwing as a form of “popular terror.”
Video threatens NCAG's future
Israeli expert and director of the Palestinian Media Watch, Itamar Marcus, told The Jerusalem Post that the newly discovered video could undermine NCAG’s legitimacy if Shaath is allowed to remain its head.
“If the United States wants this experiment for Gaza’s future to have any chance of success, it must immediately remove Shaath from his position and appoint a replacement who is honest enough to condemn violence and recognize Israel’s history and its right to exist,” he said.
And this would need to be someone “brave enough to say it publicly,” the researcher told the Post.
Marcus noted that Shaath’s ideology, as exhibited during the interview, made his appointment to the NCAG inappropriate.
“First and most important, Shaath declared the existence of Israel to be an American and European colonial implant. Shaath, the so-called apolitical leader to build Gaza, sees Israelis as foreigners and denies Israel’s right to exist,” he said.
“During the interview, he uses the PA term for Israel – ‘the occupation’ – instead of calling Israel by name. In the PA lexicon, all of Israel is an ‘occupation,’ and all Israeli cities are ‘settlements,’” Marcus continued.
MK Ohad Tal, the chair of the Religious Zionist faction in the Knesset, told the Post, “For those who seek stability and genuine peace, there is no alternative to Israeli control over Gaza.”
“Our soldiers did not fight courageously for many months only to transfer Gaza from one Palestinian terror regime to another, merely replacing one failed and dangerous government with another,” he said.
“I call on Prime Minister [Benjamin] Netanyahu to commit to the notion that in the long term in Gaza, there will be no Hamas and no Abbas. It should be a place free of anyone who seeks to follow in their path.”
Shaath enjoys his reputation as a moderate. Despite his family connections to senior members of Fatah, Shaath had previously spoken in support of a two-state solution.
In 2011, while blaming West Bank violence exclusively on Israeli settlers, Shaath told Army Radio, “I think our people are quite satisfied not to go back to violence and are going, in this fight, to continue their peaceful struggle for independence and for real peace and a two-state solution.”