Islamic Jihad emerges in Hamas shadow
In its efforts to remove Israel from the map, Hamas, the Islamist party in charge in Gaza, has a new competitor — or perhaps little brother: the Islamic Jihad resistance movement. Islamic Jihad has been growing in the shadows, an unofficial movement alongside the democratically elected Hamas, both dedicated to rocket attacks against a country they view as an occupier.

Islamic Jihad logo — Source: Wikimedia Commons

Islamic Jihad officials have argued that the greatest achievements for Hamas in the battle against Israel were achieved when they were in the “resistance” — the very position in which Islamic Jihad now finds itself, Reuters Arabic reports.

Yoni Fighel, a retired Israeli army colonel and senior researcher in counter-terrorism, argues that Islamic Jihad remains “dangerous because to a degree it is uncontrollable,” existing completely outside party politics and international diplomacy.  

At the same time, it is free from the responsibilities that can burden Hamas. Fighel says: “It doesn't have to feed all the Palestinians in Gaza, so it can be much more flexible and independent.”

Reaction to Arafat poisoning report 
Nine years after Yasser Arafat's death, news that he may have been poisoned stirred people both inside the Palestinian territories and across the Arab world. A Palestinian woman living in Qatar tweeted the following image in commemoration:

[“The revolution is not the gun of the revolutionary only; rather it is a farmer’s pick, a surgeon’s scalpel, a writer’s pen, a poet’s quill.” — Yasser Arafat, 1929-2004]

 A Jordanian Palestinian woman tweeted similarly:

“One day, one of them will pass by my grave, to tell me that my country is no longer occupied.”

Al Jazeera released a special investigative report on the alleged poisoning by polonium, as supported by Swiss forensic reports. The channel’s documentary video has also been made available in English.