Israel-Palestine conflict: The world is in disbelief following the explosion at a Gaza hospital that claimed 500 lives. Israel is being held accountable by Hamas, which rules over Palestinian land. However, Israel is blaming the deadly attack to a different Palestinian terrorist organization. The lethal explosion that occurred in the Gaza City hospital has been attributed to Palestinian ‘Islamic Jihad’ by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). The army has released footage of the area surrounding the hospital before and after the rocket launch, supporting the IDF’s claim that ‘Islamic Jihad’ attempted a failed rocket launch that struck the Al Ahli hospital.

Islamic Jihad: A Sunni Islamist Organization
Founded to oppose the “Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories” and to create an independent Palestinian state, the Islamic Jihad, also known as the Palestine Islamic Jihad (PIJ), is a Sunni Islamist organization. Among the Palestinian armed groups, it was founded in the late 1970s and is regarded as one of the more extremist factions.

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Second-Largest Palestinian Militant Group
Ziyad al-Nakhalah and Muhammad al-Hindi are the leaders of Islamic Jihad, the second-largest Palestinian militant group after Hamas, which operates in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Since the 1990s, the group’s military component, the al-Quds Brigades, has carried out multiple operations on Israeli sites. Hamas and Islamic Jihad have different ideologies and strategies, even though they both want to see an independent Palestinian state.

Hamas And Islamic Jihad
Islamic Jihad continued to concentrate mostly on armed operations, while Hamas earned some political credibility over time and even went on to win the 2006 election in Gaza. Islamic Jihad fervently supports military confrontation with the Jewish state and rejects the possibility of diplomatic agreements to end the Israel-Palestine issue. The organization views the Oslo Accords and subsequent peace accords as insufficient to resolve the conflict, and it also criticizes the Palestinian Authority.

Scholars assert that ‘Islamic Jihad’ is supported by Syria, Iran, and the powerful militant group Hezbollah in Lebanon, and that it draws inspiration from the Iranian revolution. Before being a separate organization, it first made its presence known in Palestine through a network connected to the Muslim Brotherhood, a political Islamist organization with Egyptian ancestry. In 1997, Islamic Jihad was classified as a foreign terrorist organization by the US Department of State.