The shadow of Palestinian Islamic Jihad resurfaces after a rocket hit the Ahli Arab hospital in Gaza City on Tuesday evening, killing at least 200 people. Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip, blames Israel. The Jewish state denies it and attributes the bombing to Islamic Jihad. “After a full and thorough investigation (…) we can confirm that the Islamic Jihad organization is responsible for targeting the hospital,” said Israeli army spokesperson Avichay Adraee. “Lies” from the “Zionist enemy”, responds the Islamist movement.

Since the start of the conflict between Hamas and Israel, triggered by the Islamist terrorist organization on Saturday October 7, the al-Quds brigades, the armed wing of the Palestinian Islamist Jihad (PIJ), have taken part in the fighting. But what is this organization, designated as a terrorist group by the United States, the European Union and Israel? And how does it position itself in relation to Hamas?

Palestinian Islamic Jihad was founded in Cairo, Egypt, between 1979 and 1981. Its founders, Fathi Shaqaqi and Abd al-Aziz Awda, were Palestinian students who were members of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. Judging the brotherhood to be too moderate and insufficiently committed to the Palestinian cause, they founded the Palestinian Islamic Jihad in opposition to this movement.

Today led by Ziyad al-Nakhalah, the DIP first stands out from Hamas and Fatah by its ideological hybridity. “It is an Islamo-nationalist movement of Sunni obedience, originally coming from the Muslim Brotherhood movement with a marker which is today very Iranianized”, explains to Figaro David Rigoulet-Roze, associate researcher at the Institute of Relations International and Strategic (Iris), specialist in the Middle East. Its founders effectively took up “the revolutionary and theocratic Shiite ideals adopted during the Iranian revolution of 1979 which established an Islamic regime”, analyzes the Council on Foreign Relations.

The main ally – ideological, political and financial – of the terrorist group is therefore Iran, Israel’s number one enemy. In Lebanon, where they settled in the 1980s, the leaders of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad also received training from Hezbollah, a pro-Iranian Shiite movement. DIP members can also count on Syria, where its headquarters has been located since 1989.

However, although financed by the Iranian giant, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad’s capacity to cause harm is less strong than that of Hamas. If the DIP claims more than 8,000 soldiers – where the forces of Hamas’s Ezzedin al-Qassam brigades are estimated at 20,000 fighters – it is impossible to quantify what it represents in concrete terms.

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Like Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad wants to annihilate Israel. The DIP does not recognize the existence of the Hebrew State and de facto rejects the Oslo Accords, signed in 1993 between the Palestinian Authority and the Jewish State. But the strategies of the two terrorist organizations differ. The creation of an Islamic regime desired by the DIP, which would extend throughout “all of historic Palestine” as it was under the British mandate until 1948, can only be achieved through arms.

Because unlike Hamas, which has administered the Gaza Strip alone since 2007, Palestinian Islamic Jihad does not participate in democratic processes, has no ambition for government and does not engage in diplomatic dialogue with Israel. In 2006, the DIP, for example, criticized Hamas for participating in the Palestinian legislative elections. The fight with weapons, therefore, and only weapons.

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Since 1992 and the creation of the al-Quds brigades, the DIP has regularly carried out suicide attacks targeting civilians and soldiers, “although the frequency of attacks inside Israeli territory has decreased since the construction of security barriers around Gaza,” notes the Council on Foreign Relations. In March 1996, for example, a suicide bombing in a Tel Aviv shopping center killed 20 people and injured 75 others. In October 2003, a bomb killed 22 people and injured 60 in a restaurant in Haifa.

If, in many aspects, the DIP differs from Hamas, it nevertheless remains “like other groups, tolerated by the latter, because there is a form of convergence of struggles against Israel,” observes David Rigoulet-Roze. But, “these two organizations remain autonomous even if the DIP, when it does not follow its own agenda, refers to Tehran,” continues the researcher. Who adds: “Islamic Jihad cannot do whatever it wants in Gaza either, because Hamas has hegemony over the enclave.”

If Hamas has already calmed down, or even stopped, the DIP’s attacks, the two groups sometimes carry out coordinated attacks, depending on the context. In 2011, the al-Quds brigades and the al-Qassam brigades – the armed wing of Hamas which launched the offensive against the Jewish state in early September – together bombed the settlement of Ofakim, in southern Israel. Today, as Israel prepares its response, the synergy of terrorist groups is essential.