Lhe conflict that bloodied the Gaza Strip from August 5 to 7 caused, according to Palestinian sources, the death of forty-nine people, including seventeen children. This is the fifth war waged since 2008 by Israel against this overpopulated enclave, where 2.3 million women and men survive on 360 square kilometers. But this is the first time that Israel has ostensibly spared Hamas, the undisputed master of the territory, to concentrate its strikes on the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) alone. This quite relative restraint prevailed despite the firing by the PIJ of hundreds of rockets, it is true that 97% were intercepted by Israel’s air defense. This is a rare break with the proven practice of the Jewish state which, for decades, has held the de facto or de jure authorities of a given territory responsible for actions carried out from that territory, even if they did not take the initiative.
A four-decade long history
Palestinian Islamic Jihad was founded in 1981 in the Gaza Strip by Fathi Chikaki, a Muslim Brotherhood dissident, born and raised in a refugee camp. Fascinated by the success of the Islamic revolution in Iran, Chikaki refused the line of cooperation with the occupation authorities then imposed by Sheikh Ahmed Yassin on the Muslim Brotherhood, more concerned with Islamizing Palestinian society than joining the Organization. for the Liberation of Palestine (PLO). The increasingly bold attacks of the PIJ made it the spearhead of Palestinian Islamism, until Yassine, faced with the erosion of his popular base, decided in 1987 to transform his group into Hamas, the Arabic acronym for “Islamic Resistance Movement”. The PIJ and Hamas have since found themselves in the same exaltation of the ” armed struggle “for the release of” all of Palestine », and therefore the opposition to the peace process launched by the PLO, with the recognition of Israel by Yasser Arafat in the « Oslo Accords » of 1993.
Arafat set up his “Palestinian Authority” in Gaza the following year, whose security services harshly repressed PIJ militants. The PLO is also careful not to react to the assassination of Chikaki by an Israeli commando in 1995 in Malta. The leadership of the PIJ is now provided from Damascus by Ramadan Challah, also from Gaza. The Assad regime’s political support, under both father Hafez and son Bashar, is coupled with increasingly close military collaboration with Tehran, first with the pro-Iranian Hezbollah militia in Lebanon, then directly with the Revolutionary Guards. The armed wing of the movement, the Al-Quds (“Jerusalem” in Arabic) brigades, runs clandestine cells in the West Bank, notably in Hebron and Jenin. It also claims particularly deadly suicide attacks, as in October 2003 in Haifa (twenty-one deaths in a restaurant on the seafront) and October 2005 in Hadera (seven deaths in a market), which is worth the JIP’s listed by the European Union and the United States on the list of terrorist organizations.
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