Palestinian Hamas militants are seen during a military show in the Bani Suheila district on July 20, 2017 in Gaza City, Gaza. For the past ten years Gaza residents have lived with constant power shortages, in recent years these cuts have worsened, with supply of regular power limited to four hours a day. On June 11, 2017 Israel announced a new round of cuts at the request of the Palestinian authorities and the decision was seen as an attempt by President Mahmoud Abbas to pressure Gaza’s Hamas leadership. Prior to the new cuts Gaza received 150 megawatts per day, far below it’s requirements of 450 megawatts. In April, Gaza’s sole power station which supplied 60 megawatts shut down, after running out of fuel, the three lines from Egypt, which provided 27 megawatts are rarely operational, leaving Gaza reliant on the 125 megawatts supplied by Israel’s power plant. The new cuts now restrict electricity to three hours a day severely effecting hospital patients with chronic conditions and babies on life support. During blackout hours residents use private generators, solar panels and battery operated light sources to live. June 2017 also marked ten years since Israel began a land, sea and air blockade over Gaza. Under the blockade, movement of people and goods is restricted and exports and imports of raw materials have been banned. The restrictions have virtually cut off access for Gaza’s two million residents to the outside world and unemployment rates have skyrocketed forcing many people into poverty and leaving approximately 80% of the population dependent on humanitarian aid. (Photo by Chris McGrath/Getty Images) Hamas arrested two people with ties to ISIS on Aug. 28. They are also in connection to two Aug. 27 bombings in the Gaza Strip.
The BBC reports that the two bombings – both of which involved motorcycles exploding near a checkpoint – resulted in three Gaza police officers dead, prompting Hamas to declare a state of emergency. One of the suspects is believed to have been released from Gaza detainment by Hamas earlier in the month “as a gesture of goodwill,” according to the BBC.
Israel, which bombed a Hamas military post earlier in the day as retaliation for Hamas mortar fire toward Israel, denied any involvement in the matter.
In January 2018, ISIS declared war on Hamas in a video, accusing the Gaza terror group of being ineffective in preventing President Donald Trump from moving the United States embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and focusing only on fighting the Israeli “occupation” and not the “false creed” of the Jewish people. Hamas, whose charter calls for the killing of Jews, dismissed the video at the time as being a “Zionist production.”
Earlier in August, the ISIS supporting group Jaysh Al-Islam in Gaza released a video accusing Hamas of apostasy for allying with Iran and Saudi Arabia and “of harboring aspirations to democracy,” Jewish News Syndicate reports.
In 2014, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told the United Nations that ISIS and Hamas “are branches of the same poisonous tree” of radical Islamic terror that seeks a global Islamic caliphate.
“Left unchecked, the cancer grows, metastasizing over wider and wider areas,” Netanyahu said. “To protect the peace and security of the world, we must remove this cancer before it’s too late.”
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