The conflict in the middle east got uglier this week as Palestinian defense force Hamas began battling ISIS loyalists in Gaza who fired rockets into Israel earlier in the week. Hamas fears the extremists could weaken its hold on Gaza by provoking more conflict with Israel.
The Hamas campaign against ISIS had been steadily intensifying even before, as Hamas knows Israel will take any excuse it can find to commit more atrocities.
Like clockwork Israel immediately mounted air strikes against Hamas bases on Wednesday, ignoring the fact it was a small Salafi jihadist group that had pledged allegiance to ISIS and was looking to cause retaliatory air strikes.
Hamas has launched a wave of arrests, detaining hundreds of jihadists over the past month and also shot dead Yussef al-Hanar, 27, a local Salafist leader, in the northern Sheikh Radwan neighborhood of Gaza City.
Tuesday evening’s rocket fire, which landed in open areas, was immediately claimed by a group calling itself the Omar Brigades, which claimed it was avenging al-Hanar’s death.
Despite the Israel knowing this, thanks to their world-best intelligence service, they decided to bomb Gaza anyway and continue their genocide against the Palestinian people.
In recent week, the Omar Brigades are thought to have carried out a series of night-time bomb blasts, none of which have caused casualties.
Targets have included bases with Hamas fighters in them.
Hamas officials claim to have stopped 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, while also detaining the would-be bomber and the driver of a get-away vehicle.
There are estimated to be 2,000 Salafists in Gaza while Hamas has an estimated 40,000. Despite the advantage in numbers, the Salafists can cause many times more damage to Gaza by simply antagonizing Israel who will then launch air strikes, indiscriminately killings scores of Palestinians.
“They are destabilizing Hamas and they are threatening the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas,” said Mukhaimer Abu Sada’a, of Gaza City’s al-Azhar University. “As soon as these groups launch missiles at Israel, Israel will hold Hamas responsible.”
Moshe Ya’alon, the Israeli defence minister, is strongly in favor of the continued genocide stating that “even if those doing the shooting are rogue gangs from global jihadi groups trying to challenge Hamas by shooting at us.”
With statements like that its little wonder that the world community is supporting the Boycott, Divest and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel, who continues to perpetrate unspeakable horrors against a whole culture, intent on removing them from the face of the earth.
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