Aug. 6 (EUROPA PRESS) –
Islamic Jihad, the terrorist organization targeted by the latest Israeli bombing campaign on Gaza, is the second largest armed force in the enclave after Hamas, but unlike the Islamist movement which, it should be remembered, is not participating in this confrontation for now, it distinguished by its total absence in the political life of the territory.
The group, founded in 1979 by the Islamic fundamentalist Fathi Shaqaqi and other Palestinian students in Egypt, is also distinguished by strong ties with Iran, Israel’s declared enemy in the region.
Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid recalled on Friday, at the beginning of the bombing, that the group’s secretary general, Ziad al Najala, was visiting Tehran precisely when the bombing of Gaza began. The then US Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, described the group in 2019 as the “terrorist representative of Iran” in Palestine.
Another senior official of the group, Mohamed Shalah, applauded the Iranian authorities as the “great friend of the Palestinian people”, in an interview with AlahedNews published in the middle of last month, but the group has specified that the proximity to Iran is given for their common cause against Israel and not for becoming, as Iranian commander Gholam Ali Rashid pointed out last year, the possible armed wing of the Islamic republic in the Gaza Strip.
In any case, both share a long relationship that dates back to the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran, considered by the founder of Islamic Jihad as the event that would finally lead to the unity of the Muslim world.
Already in the 1980s, and established in Gaza, the group would begin preparations for its first major terrorist campaign, which would last from the middle of the decade until 1988, when its founder was expelled to Lebanon, where it further strengthened its ties with Iran and the Lebanese Shia militia party Hezbollah, an ally of Tehran. He died in 1995 in an Israeli targeted assassination operation carried out in Malta.
In its 40-year history, the group, whose presence in Gaza is prominent in some religious institutions, has assumed responsibility for more than thirty attacks that have earned it designation as a terrorist organization by the United States, the European Union , United Kingdom, Japan, Canada and Israel, among others, and developed its armed wing, the Al Quds Brigades, Israel’s main contenders in this new conflict.
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