Position paper: Jihadi groups in Palestine / researcher Islam Mousa
The jihadi armed current is recent in Palestine, appearing only a few years ago and concentrated almost wholly in the Gaza Strip; in the West Bank it amounts to small, local youth groups lacking experience. The paper maps the phenomenon. (The views are the author's own.)
- Author
- The editorial team
- Date
- 2016-11-17
The opinions contained in the paper express only the opinion of their author and do not necessarily express the opinion of Pal-Think for Strategic Studies
The armed jihadi group is considered of recent standing in Palestine, having appeared only some several years ago, and it is concentrated entirely in the Gaza Strip. As for the West Bank, it appears we are before youth groups limited in number and local in activity, lacking experience, but gathered by infatuation with salafi-jihadi
thought; and no sooner did they attempt to test their capacities on the ground than they succeeded in widening their “individual jihadi” activity and forming some cells that soon fell into the occupation's grip — such as the Hebron cell on 26 November 2013, three of whose members were killed, and whom the Mujahideen Shura Council organisation, which has activity in Gaza and Sinai, claimed.
As for Gaza, the armed groups have multiplied, and their appearance was tied to their officials' claiming of assaults on citizens' properties or armed operations against the Zionist enemy. They took on different names, but they did not reach an advanced stage of influence on the Palestinian street or of exposing public properties to danger to a great extent — except for some incidents not exceeding dozens, all of them incidents against civilians' public properties and some properties of political and security leaders, and some of them following political and security disputes with the ruling authority in Gaza; but all the incidents recorded no injuries or killing of Palestinian individuals. Some of these groups' names have disappeared from the stage, and some continued to affirm their presence, such as: the Army of Islam, the Army of the Nation, the Tawhid and Jihad group, Ansar Allah, the Tawhid Brigade, the Jaljalat group, the Omar Hadid Company, Ansar al-Sharia, and the Sabireen movement — which some consider close to Shia thought and not Sunni like the rest of the groups.
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