The conflict that bloodied the Gaza Strip, from August 5 to 7, caused Palestinian sources there, the death of forty-nine people, including seventeen children. This is the fifth war waged since 2008 by Israel against this overcrowded enclave, where 2.3 million women and men survive 360 square kilometers. But it is the first time that Israel ostensibly spares Hamas, an undisputed master of the territory, to concentrate its strikes on the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (JIP). This relative restraint prevailed despite the JIP shot of hundreds of rockets, it is true 97 % intercepted by the air defense of Israel. It is a rare break with the proven practice of the Hebrew State which, for decades, has considers the authorities in fact or of law of a territory given as responsible for the actions carried out from this territory, even if They did not take the initiative.
A four decades long story
The Palestinian Islamic jihad was founded, in 1981, in the Gaza Strip, by Fathi Chikaki, a dissident of the Muslim Brotherhood, 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 that she was imposed by the sheikh Ahmed Yassine on the Muslim Brotherhood, more concerned with Islamize Palestinian society than to join the organization Liberation of Palestine (OLP). The increasingly daring attacks of the JIP made the spearhead of Palestinian Islamism, until Yassine, faced with the erosion of her popular base, decided in 1987 to transform her group into Hamas, the ‘Arab acronym for the “movement of Islamic resistance”. JIP and Hamas have since found themselves in the same exaltation of the “armed struggle” for the liberation of “all Palestine”, and therefore the opposition to the peace process launched by the OLP, with the recognition of Israel By Yasser Arafat in the “Oslo agreements” of 1993.
Arafat installs the following year in Gaza his “Palestinian Authority”, whose security services harshly repress JIP activists. The OLP is also careful not to react to the assassination of Chikaki by an Israeli commando in 1995 in Malta. The management of the JIP is now provided from Damascus by Ramadan Challah, also from Gaza. The political support of the Assad regime, under Father Hafez as under the son Bashar, is coupled with an increasingly close military collaboration with Tehran, first with the Pro-Iranian militia of Hezbollah in Lebanon, then directly with the Revolutionary guards. The armed branch of the movement, the al-qods brigades (“Jerusalem”, in Arabic), animates clandestine cells in the West Bank, notably in Hebron and Jenine. It also claims particularly deadly suicide bombings, as in October 2003 in Haifa (twenty-one people in a restaurant of the seafront) and October 2005 in Hadera (seven killed on a market), which is worth the JIP to be Listed by the European Union and the United States on the list of terrorist organizations.
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