As Islamic terrorist organizations throughout the Middle East proliferate and exhibit new levels of brutality, the Palestinian terror group Hamas finds itself facing a threat to its rule in Gaza.
Over the last month, Islamic State-inspired jihadist groups in Gaza, who argue that Hamas has been too lenient toward Israel and has failed to implement Islamic Sharia Law, have launched a campaign entailing both propaganda and physical attacks on Hamas.
A Salafi terror group that calls itself the “Supporters of the Islamic State in Jerusalem” recently threatened Hamas with a 72-hour ultimatum to release imprisoned Salafi extremists detained by Hamas or face attacks, after Hamas destroyed a mosque belonging to the group and arrested several of its members.
The Salafi jihadists followed up on their calls by launching mortar attacks on a Hamas base in southern Gaza and other attacks on Hamas security posts. Hamas responded with a large crackdown, setting up checkpoints and deploying gunmen in Salafi strongholds.
“At this time, they [Islamic State supporters in Gaza] are marginal; I don’t think they have the overwhelming public support that some of the recent headlines suggest,” Neri Zilber, a visiting scholar at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, told JNS.
“There is ongoing public disenchantment against Hamas inside of Gaza,” said Zilber. “Their popularity did spike after the [last summer’s] war [with Israel], as a sort of ‘rally around the flag’ effect. But conditions inside of Gaza are still quite terrible and much worse than they were before the war.”
The presence of Salafi groups in Gaza is not a new phenomenon, with several such groups operating in the coastal enclave for years. Salafism is a fundamentalist movement in Islam closely tied to Wahhabism, which is a Saudi-based ideology that has inspired Islamic extremists groups like al Qaeda.
Like Islamic State terrorists operating in Syria and Iraq, Salafi jihadists in Gaza do not recognize national boundaries and call for a global Caliphate. While they do share Hamas’s goal of the destruction of Israel, they view Hamas’s ideology as too narrowly focused on the Palestinian cause.
For many years Hamas tolerated the Salafi jihadists, but recently these groups have become more antagonistic toward Hamas. In particular, the Salafi jihadists have criticized Hamas for its truces with Israel after conflicts in 2009 and 2012.
At the same time, after decades of neglect by the Egyptian government, the nearby Sinai Peninsula has become a hotbed of Islamic extremist activity. In 2014, the Sinai-based terror group Ansar Bayt al-Maqdis pledged loyalty to Islamic State and has carried out Islamic State-style executions such as decapitations of Egyptian soldiers in the Sinai. The group now refers to itself as Wilayet Sinai (Province of Sinai), in reference to it being a Sinai-based branch of Islamic State.
The Egyptian military, with tacit cooperation from Israel, has launched a major campaign to exterminate terror groups in the Sinai and to weaken Hamas in Gaza. Both Hamas and its parent group, the Muslim Brotherhood, are Egyptian government-designated terror groups.
Despite the growing threat of Salafi jihadists, Hamas officials have denied that Islamic State has a real presence in Gaza.
“There is nothing called the Islamic State in the Gaza Strip,” Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri recently said.
Yet Salafi jihadists in Gaza, like Islamic terrorists in Libya, Nigeria, and the Sinai, have sought Islamic State’s blessings in their quest for affiliation with the terror group. The Salafis are making their presence known on social media, threatening Hamas with more attacks.
“They were inspired by the presence of ISIS (Islamic State) in Iraq and Syria and moreover in the Egyptian Sinai Peninsula,” Hani Habib, a Gaza-based political analyst, told Reuters.