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.”
