Hamas supporters wave the movement's flag after prayers on the third Friday of the holy month of Ramadan at the compound known to Muslims as the Noble Sanctuary and to Jews as Temple Mount, in Jerusalem's Old City, July 3, 2015.Ammar Awad/Reuters
The extremist Sunni group known as Islamic State has declared war on the militant Islamic resistance movement known as Hamas.
In a statement this week from an IS stronghold in Syria, a masked spokesman for Islamic State told the "tyrants of Hamas" that IS followers will "uproot" the Palestinian movement along with the "state of the Jews" (Israel) and Fatah, the secular Palestinian movement that rules over Palestinians in the West Bank.
The spokesman stated that all three groups "are nothing" and "will be overrun by our creeping multitudes."
Those multitudes are definitely creeping up on Hamas in Gaza where growing numbers of Salafists (those who seek to return Muslim lands to the ways of their pious forefathers) have voiced their displeasure with Hamas – not that the group is too extreme and has triggered destructive attacks on Gaza by Israel, but that it is not extreme enough.
On first glance it would seem odd that Islamic State, the poster child of extreme Sunni Islam, would threaten to overthrow Hamas, a fellow Sunni militant group. After all, IS leaders have justified their capture of large swathes of Syria and Iraq as a war against infidels in a campaign to re-establish an Islamic caliphate.
In Syria, those infidels take the form of the governing Alawites – a Shia-related sect, far removed from Sunni Islam. In Iraq, they are the Shiites who control the Iraqi government. In both countries IS forces are fighting against Shia militias such as Hezbollah, that have been marshalled by Iran – the most dominant Shia state – and the IS militants' ultimate target.
In recent attacks in Yemen, France, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Tunisia, IS-backed elements also focused on attacking Shiites and secular Westerners.
In Palestine, Islamic State looks on the trio of Hamas, the Palestinian Authority and Israel as an infidel package, with Israel the great stain on what once was dar al Islam (the land of Islam) and with the Palestinian groups being failures in removing that stain.
Of the two, Hamas is viewed more critically because it presents itself as a Sunni resistance movement, yet has stooped to take money and weapons from Shia Iran, thereby betraying its Sunni Muslim roots. Islamic State is calling on its local admirers in Gaza to join its campaign against all infidels and overrun the Gazan authorities.
"The rule of sharia [Islamic law] will be implemented in Gaza, in spite of you," the IS spokesman told Hamas. "We swear that what is happening in the Levant today, and in particular the Yarmouk camp, will happen in Gaza," he said, referring to IS advances in Syria, particularly in Yarmouk, a Damascus district founded by Palestinian refugees.
There has been a stream of Salafi-Jihadists in Gaza in recent years, but Hamas has, so far, been able to deal with them.
In the summer of 2009, following Israel's first devastating war against Hamas in Gaza, a leader in the Salafi-Jihadist community in the southern Gaza town of Rafah summoned people to join him in declaring an Islamic state, much as IS leaders declare today. Abdel Latif Musa's goal was to expose the failure of Hamas to establish such a thing.
More than 2,000 Palestinians in Gaza turned up. Hamas would not tolerate it and, after two days of fighting, Sheik Musa and 23 of his followers lay dead. Dozens more were thrown in prison.
In April, 2011, following the popular uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, another group of self-styled Salafi-Jihadists sought to teach Hamas a lesson and abducted a Gaza-based Italian activist. The abductors demanded that Hamas release a popular Salafist from prison or they would kill the Italian. They killed him, even before the deadline for release had passed.
Hamas crushed the cell, killing three of the four abductors and imprisoning the other.
In the past few weeks, Hamas also has moved to stem the rise of yet more Salafi activists who have criticized Hamas leaders for their ceasefire agreement with Israel. The activists sought to destabilize Gaza by firing rockets at Israel, knowing the Israelis would strike back at Hamas and other targets in the strip. Some 200 to 300 alleged jihadists were arrested and one of their leaders was shot dead while being detained.
It was this latest episode that apparently prompted Islamic State to declare its campaign against Hamas this week. The declaration is in keeping with the call to arms IS leaders issued a week ago, calling for concerted attacks on infidels during the holy Muslim month of Ramadan. That call led to last week's attacks in Tunisia and Kuwait.
And the declaration came the day before IS-backed fighters in Sinai launched some 20 simultaneous attacks on Egyptian security forces in the nearby Sinai Peninsula, killing scores. Despite an increase in the number of Egyptian forces in Sinai, these IS-backed groups are threatening Egypt's hold on the peninsula. Much to Israel's and Hamas's great concern, these groups are most active in Sinai's northeastern Sheik Zuweid district, not far from the Gaza Strip.
While Israeli leaders have strongly condemned Hamas, refusing to consider open negotiations with the group, recent events in Gaza, Sinai and throughout the region may awaken Israel to the possibility that there are groups worse than Hamas with which it may have to deal.