Isil takes aim at Hamas


July 22, 2015
Sarah Benton

An article by Robert Tait, June 4th, follows the lead article from Al Jazeera.


Palestinians stand around a vehicle destroyed in blast in Gaza City on Sunday, July 19, 2015. At least four explosions rocked Gaza City early Sunday, targeting vehicles belonging to officials from Islamic factions, including the territory’s Hamas rulers. There was no claim of responsibility, but speculation immediately centered on supporters of the Islamic State group, who have been battling with Hamas and other Islamic groups in the small coastal strip. Caption, Ynet/AP, photo by Hassan Mahmoud / AP

Gaza’s ‘jihadists’ can no longer be dismissed

The car bomb attacks on Hamas are an outcome of the systematic challenges that the Strip faces every day.

By Sharif Nashashibi, Al Jazeera
July 21, 2015

No one has yet claimed responsibility for Sunday’s multiple bombings in Gaza that targeted cars belonging to Hamas and Islamic Jihad officials. However, the most likely suspect is the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).

A graffiti purportedly showing an emblem used by the group was drawn on one of the cars, and the targeted area was the scene of clashes in June between Hamas and ISIL fighters. While Hamas has not officially laid blame, one of its commanders has accused ISIL.

The explosions come less than three weeks after ISIL’s threat to “uproot” and “overrun” the “tyrants of Hamas” in Gaza, and to implement Islamic law there.

If its responsibility for Sunday’s car bombings is confirmed, it would represent the latest in a string of recent attacks by its sympathisers against Hamas in Gaza – a “jihadist challenge” to the latter’s authority that would have been unthinkable not long ago.

This year alone, there have reportedly been at least a dozen such attacks prior to the most recent, including four in May.

Insidious threat

Hamas has tried to downplay ISIL’s presence, no doubt to show its enemies – and reassure those it governs – that it is still in control. One of its leaders, Osama Hamdan, on Sunday said: “They don’t have any real support in Gaza.”

Spokesperson Sami Abu Zuhri in May said: “There is nothing called the Islamic State” in Gaza, and the group only had “some supporters” in the territory. An interior ministry spokesman blamed “vandals” for Sunday’s bombings, and “lawbreakers” were behind explosions in May.

However, Hamas’ attempts to dismiss the ISIL threat are increasingly unconvincing with every attack. The fighters may not be anywhere near capable of taking over Gaza, and the extent to which their influence is spreading is debatable, but their presence can no longer be ignored, nor can their desire and growing ability to destabilise the territory.

Given Hamas’ intensified crackdown, the Palestinian group is aware of the threat it faces, even if it will not publicly acknowledge it.

ISIL’s presence in Gaza would not be possible without the years-long blockade of the territory by Israel and Egypt. The humanitarian disaster this has caused – which was worsened by Israel’s devastating onslaught last summer – is providing its fighters with fertile ground for recruitment among sections of the impoverished territory’s increasingly desperate population.

With neither Israel, nor Egypt willing to even loosen the blockade, the plight of Gazans will continue to worsen to the benefit of ISIL’s membership and sympathisers.

Hamas can take a measure of comfort in the fact that ISIL has made enemies of all other relevant players as well. Its recent threat against Hamas was also specifically directed at Israel and Fatah, which dominates the Palestinian Authority (PA).

ISIL affiliate Sinai Province is waging an increasingly bloody rebellion against Egypt’s government, and has fired rockets at Israel several times (most recently this month). Islamic Jihad is now also in ISIL’s crosshairs.

Regional security needs

Likewise, none of these parties should take comfort in the challenge that Hamas faces, because an ISIL emirate in Gaza is far less palatable. Israeli officials have acknowledged this.

Last month, former Mossad chief Ephraim Halevy said Hamas’ “battle against other organisations in the Gaza Strip, which reject its authority, serves Israel’s security needs”.

In May, Sami Turgeman, the commander of Israel’s forces outside Gaza who had a leading role in last year’s war, said both sides “have shared interests”, including “quiet and calm”.

“There is no substitute for Hamas as sovereign in the Strip. The substitute is the [Israeli army] and chaotic rule […] and then the security situation would be much more problematic,” he added.

The ‘jihadist challenge’ in Gaza should not be seen purely from a security perspective, because its roots lie in the humanitarian disaster caused by Israel and Egypt, and enabled by the international community’s failure to exert the necessary pressure to end the blockade.

That has not stopped baseless claims by Israeli and Egyptian officials that Hamas and ISIL are cooperating, nor has it stopped Israel and the PA from cracking down on Hamas in the West Bank.

Hamas has been militarily, economically, and politically weakened by the blockade, last summer’s war and the repercussions of regional crises such as Syria and the ouster of former Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi, who was sympathetic to the faction.

However, its fortunes – and hence its ability to overcome the “jihadist challenge” – may improve significantly in light of the Iran nuclear deal signed this month. This entails the lifting of wide-ranging sanctions, thus holding the prospect of greater Iranian financial and military aid to Hamas.

Bilateral ties have been on the mend since late 2013, after Tehran cut vital funding following Hamas’ refusal to side with President Bashar al-Assad against the Syrian rebels.

However, a rare meeting between top Hamas and Saudi officials just two days after the signing of the nuclear deal could signal a pre-emptive attempt by Riyadh to pry Hamas away from Tehran’s sphere of influence.

This raises the possibility of Saudi financial aid as an inducement. Relations between Hamas and Riyadh have reportedly improved since Saudi King Salman assumed the throne in January.

The “jihadist challenge” in Gaza should not be seen purely from a security perspective, because its roots lie in the humanitarian disaster caused by Israel and Egypt, and enabled by the international community’s failure to exert the necessary pressure to end the blockade.

The longer Gazans languish in what is aptly described as the world’s largest open-air prison, the easier it will be for ISIL and its ilk to establish themselves in the territory.

Sharif Nashashibi is an award-winning journalist and analyst on Arab affairs.


Hamas wages crackdown against pro-Isil jihadists in Gaza

Fears that hardline pro-Isil salafist groups in Gaza could draw Hamas into another conflict with Israel by firing rockets in breach of last year’s ceasefire

By Robert Tait, Telegraph
June 04, 2015

Gaza City–Hamas is battling Islamic State (Isil) loyalists in Gaza who fired a volley of rockets into Israel, fearing the extremist rivals could weaken their hold on the territory by provoking a new conflict with the Jewish state.

The campaign has been steadily intensifying even before Israel mounted air strikes against Hamas bases on Wednesday in retaliation for rocket fire that was blamed on a small salafi jihadist group which has pledged allegiance to Isil.

A wave of arrests resulting in the detention of hundreds of jihadists over the past month reached a new peak this week when Hamas forces shot dead Yussef al-Hanar, 27, a local salafist leader, in the northern Sheikh Radwan neighbourhood of Gaza City. Officials said he was shot during an attempt to take him into custody.

Tuesday evening’s rocket fire, which landed in open areas near the Israeli port city of Ashdod and nearby Netivot, was claimed by a group calling itself the Omar Brigades. The group said in a statement that it was avenging al-Hanar’s death.


One of the first manifestations of salafists in Gaza: flying ISIL flag during protest against Charlie Hebdo outside the French Cultural Centre in Gaza City. Photo by Reuters.

Analysts in Gaza say the salafists – who embrace a strictly ascetic form of Islam – accuse Hamas of abandoning the path of resistance against Israel by agreeing to last summer’s ceasefire that ended 50 days of bloody warfare in the coastal strip.

In recent week, the Omar Brigades – which allies itself with the Supporters of the Islamic State in Jerusalem, a jihadist organisation based in Egypt’s Sinai region – is thought to have been responsible for a series of night-time bomb blasts, none of which have caused any casualties.

They included a rocket attack on a training base belonging to the Izzedine al-Qassam brigades, Hamas’ military wing, in the southern town of Khan Younis.

Hamas responded by arresting between 200 and 300 known salafists and demolishing a makeshift mosque used by the groups on Salaheddin Road, Gaza’s main north-south traffic artery, in Deir al-Balah. Night-time check-points have been established throughout the territory in an attempt to detect and deter further attacks.

• Gaza jobless rate highest in the world at 44 per cent says new report from World Bank

In what is described as potentially the most serious incident, Hamas officials claim to have foiled a plan to explode a 30kg car bomb last month just minutes before it was due to detonate in Gaza City’s packed Shujaiyyah market area, which sustained devastating shelling during last summer’s war.

The Eastern Gaza City Shujaiyyah neighbourhood (AFP)

The alleged would-be bomber and the driver of a get-away vehicle were arrested, said Fawzi Barhoum, a Hamas spokesman, though neither have been identified.

The salafists, who are estimated to be 2,000-strong, are likely to be little match for Hamas, whose forces number 15,000 in the al-Qassam brigades and another 25,000 as part of its security apparatus.

But they are capable of undermining Hamas’ control of the impoverished coastal strip, where popular discontent runs high over unpaid salaries and a continuing failure to repair devastating war damage that saw around 18,000 homes destroyed or rendered uninhabitable.

“They are destabilising Hamas and they are threatening the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas,” said Mukhaimer Abu Sada’a, a political scientist at Gaza City’s al-Azhar University. “As soon as these groups launch missiles at Israel, Israel will hold Hamas responsible.”

That was borne out on Wednesday when Moshe Ya’alon, the Israeli defence minister, said he held Hamas to blame for the latest attacks “even if those doing the shooting are rogue gangs from global jihadi groups trying to challenge Hamas by shooting at us”.

Mt Barhoum in turn, suggested Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency, was involved in the rise of the salafists, whom he preferred to describe as “radicals” who had become disillusioned under the years-long blockade of Gaza. “They [Mossad] control such groups and leave them to confront Hamas and try to turn Gaza into Syria and Iraq,” he said.

He said the local authorities were trying to reform the arrested salafis, including through education and psychological counselling, to return to the “moderate Islam” which he insisted Hamas represented.

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