5/3/14, "Islamic Jihad Gains New Traction in Gaza," NY Times, Jodi Rudoren, Gaza
"Shortly before midnight, seven black-masked young men in camouflage stood in a field of waist-high weeds, Kalashnikov rifles pointed toward the Mediterranean Sea a half-mile away.
No
Israeli soldier has set foot in Gaza City in five years, but the
25-year-old commander of this band of Al-Quds Brigades — the armed wing
of Islamic Jihad — said his troops stand vigil here nightly to “protect
the Palestinian people” from any “incursion.” Every few minutes, in what
may have been a nightly ritual or an effort to broadcast to the world
their readiness to fight, the radio on the commander’s shoulder crackled
with warnings: drones in the east, F-16s overhead, gunboat movement at
sea.
“You
are the men; you, the Al-Quds Brigades, are the real men,” the voice
said after reciting verses from the Quran praising jihadist militants
and martyrs. “God protect you in the field.”
Smaller
and less known internationally than the militant Islamic Hamas faction
that has ruled since 2007, Islamic Jihad and its Al-Quds Brigades are
having something of a renaissance. Last month the group captured global headlines
by firing a barrage of 100 rockets toward Israel in less than an hour.
Polls show that support for Islamic Jihad among residents of Gaza
remains far below that of the leading political factions but has seen an
uptick as the group has lately built health clinics, opened schools,
and expanded its family-mediation services.
Though
not a signatory to the reconciliation pact last month between Hamas and
the Palestine Liberation Organization, Islamic Jihad would join Hamas
as part of the formal Palestinian leadership if the deal were
implemented. At the same time, Egypt recently allowed three of the
group’s senior leaders to leave Gaza through the country’s territory —
to meet the group’s chief in Beirut — something no Hamas official had
been allowed to do since last summer’s military-backed ouster of
President Mohamed Morsi of Egypt.
Founded
nearly a decade ahead of Hamas, Islamic Jihad has long shunned
electoral politics to focus on military resistance to the Israeli
occupation. Now, analysts say that because it is backed by Iranian funds
and free of any burden of governing, Islamic Jihad has been able to
assert itself as the main military expression of Palestinian
nationalism, while Hamas is partly blamed by a restive population for
rampant unemployment and daily shortfalls of fuel, electricity and
water.
There
is scant ideological space between the two movements. While some
characterize Islamic Jihad as a rival Hamas struggles to control,
leaders of both groups, as well as independent analysts, say they are
coordinated and complementary. As Hamas has suffered from severed ties
with Syria, Iran and Egypt, Islamic Jihad has maintained relations with
all three and increased its activity in Gaza.
“They
are a very distant second to Hamas in military power, in supporters, in
civil society, in every dimension of strength that you could think of,
but they’re growing for sure,” said Nathan Thrall of the International
Crisis Group, who wrote a recent report on Gaza.
”They have similar visions and strategic ideas. Some of the tension
comes from the fact that Islamic Jihad doesn’t govern Gaza and doesn’t
really suffer the consequences. They’re ready to attack Israel all day
long.”
Abu
Ahmed, a spokesman for Al-Quds Brigades who — like the 25-year-old
commander, Abu Malek — agreed to an interview on the condition that he
be identified only by his nickname, declined to say how many fighters it
enlists or how much they are paid. He was quoted by Reuters in 2011 saying the Gaza force was 8,000 strong.
A senior intelligence official with the Israel Defense Forces put the number at half that, compared with 10,000 for the Izzedine al-Qassam Brigades,
Hamas’s armed wing. Together, he said, the two groups have manufactured
200 rockets capable of reaching Tel Aviv, 10 times the number they
possessed two years ago, though such estimates could not be verified and
could be part of an effort to emphasize the threats Israel faces.
Hamas officials were clearly irked last month when Islamic Jihad announced
it had worked directly with Egypt’s new military-backed government,
which deemed Hamas a terrorist group, to restore calm with Israel. But
Islamic Jihad leaders, operating from exile in Damascus, have also tried
to smooth relations between Hamas and Iran after a parting over the
Syrian civil war.
“They
are trying to walk on a very thin line between Israel and Hamas and the
Iranian pressure in the background,” the Israeli intelligence official
said. “They do not want to embarrass Hamas.”
Hamas,
he added, “finds itself in a very complicated situation,” concerned
that Islamic Jihad’s aggression risks unwanted escalation with Israel,
“but they do not want to be considered or portrayed as the government
that limited the resistance, so they prefer to talk with them and to
coordinate with them.”
Islamic
Jihad was created in 1979 by Palestinian students at Egyptian
universities who were inspired by Iran’s Islamic revolution, and
disillusioned that the Muslim Brotherhood — from which Hamas spun off
years later — was not focused enough on Palestine. Its founder, Fathi Shikaki,
was assassinated by Israeli agents in Malta in 1995; in some Gaza
precincts, his picture is more prominent than that of the Hamas prime
minister.
The
United States designated Islamic Jihad a terrorist organization in
1997. The secretary general, Ramadan Shallah, who is on the F.B.I.’s most wanted list, said in a 2009 interview that he would never “accept the existence of the state of Israel,” and that “our sacred duty is to fight.”
The Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research
found 5 percent of Gaza residents supporting Islamic Jihad in December
and 4 percent in March, up from 1 to 3 percent in recent years. “It’s
always been an elitist group,” said the center’s director, Khalil
Shikaki, who is also Fathi Shikaki’s brother. “It appealed more to the educated youth rather than to the older generation or to the mass of people.”
Abu
Malek, the field commander, said he joined at 18 because of Islamic
Jihad’s “pioneering ideology” promoting “the liberation of all Palestine
from the sea to the river.” He says he teaches sixth grade at a
Hamas-run school and studies for a master’s in Arabic by day, but goes
to the field every night after the last of Islam’s five daily prayers,
remaining until the dawn call for the first.
His
men stood amid scrawny trees, one with arms folded, another holding his
automatic rifle. A third shouldered a rocket-propelled grenade. The
field, in southwest Gaza City, is rimmed by apartment blocks. It sits
about 600 yards behind a restaurant and gas station on the main
beachfront road....
The
armed wing remains Islamic Jihad’s priority, but its civic activities
have been swelling. Daoud Shihab, the chief spokesman — who, like Abu
Ahmed, operates from an unmarked office above a store selling strollers
and toys — said the movement planned to build a cardiac hospital in
central Gaza and four clinics. Those projects have been delayed by
Egypt’s shutdown of smuggling tunnels and Israel’s ban on import of
concrete and steel.
Islamic
Jihad runs three private elementary schools and is planning three more,
Mr. Shihab said. The group has doubled its kindergartens to 100 in the
past five years; at one in Gaza City’s Zeitoun neighborhood recently,
some of the 700 students alternated between chanting Quranic verses and
singing the A B C’s.
Above
the bustling market in Shejaya, an Islamic Jihad stronghold, sits one
of the movement’s 12 reconciliation centers, where middle-aged men in
religious robes mediate disputes between families. Omar Farra, a mosque
preacher and the movement’s leader, said the men resolved hundreds of
cases a year, much quicker than the Hamas courts.
After
a woman died in childbirth, her family demanded about $35,000 from the
doctor. Mediators persuaded the family to accept $24,000, but the doctor
would pay only about $21,000, so Islamic Jihad bridged the gap.
“What is more important for us is to make the reconciliation,” Mr. Farra explained, “so we paid.”"
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