Israel emerged encouraged from its latest military operation in the Gaza Strip against the Islamic Jihad with a sense of self-confidence and strengthened deterrence, something that greatly worries the Palestinians.
The IDF continues its activities in the West Bank and makes arrests of Islamic Jihad operatives, the task is to expose the organization’s secret infrastructure mainly in the northern Bank in order to eliminate its activities after it has completely pushed the Palestinian Authority away from the areas of Jenin, Nablus and TulKarm.
Ziyad Al-Nakhalah, the leader of the Islamic Jihad, called the short round of fighting in the Gaza Strip the ” Unification of all Fronts” although Hamas did not participate in the fighting.
Al-Nakhalah wanted to show that all the “resistance” factions were united against the Israeli enemy despite their different positions.
The Islamic Jihad claims that it forced Israel to release the hunger-striking administrative prisoner Khalil al-Awawda and Bassam al-Saadi, the senior Islamic Jihad figure arrested in Jenin.
Israel denies that and says that it never committed to release them as part of the ceasefire agreement.
A delegation of senior Egyptian intelligence officials will arrive in Israel and the Gaza Strip this week to discuss the release of the two.
The failure of the Islamic Jihad
The administrative prisoner Khalil Al-Awawda was transferred last weekend to “Assaf Harofeh” Hospital after his medical condition deteriorated. He has been on hunger strike for 164 days and refuses to receive medical treatment.
The Islamic Jihad has been waging a struggle for several years through its operatives who were arrested by Israel in administrative detention using a method of long hunger strikesץ
The hunger strikes of the security prisoners in the Israeli prisons were for decades a weapon in the struggle of the security prisoners to improve their prison conditions in the Israeli prisons, in recent years the administrative detainees have also adopted it trying to put pressure on Israel to shorten the period of their administrative detention or not to renew it at all.
This time the Lapid-Ganz government did not back down in the face of the Islamic Jihad that demanded the release of the prisoner Khalil Al-Awawda and also rejected its demand to release the senior leader of the organization Basam al-Saadi who was arrested in Jenin, Israel did not blink and went all the way even at the cost of a short round of fighting in the strip Gaza, during which more than a thousand rockets were fired at Israel and did not allow the Islamic Jihad to create a new equation and change the rules of the game that had been used until now.
Security officials in Israel emphasize that the Shin Bet has no intention of stopping the use of the tool of administrative detention.
Unification of all Fronts strategy
According to Ziyad Al-Nakhala, this term means
the firing of rockets from the Gaza Strip at Israel, an intifada in the West Bank and an intifada among the younger generation of Israeli Arabs in the areas of the Green Line.
This is the strategy of the Islamic Jihad on how to fight Israel and ” liberate all of Palatine”.
The battle against Israel should be a daily one that will lead to an all-out war in all fronts.
A senior security official says that Israel will not allow the Islamic Jihad to change the rules of the game and implement its new strategy.
Rage in the Islamic Jihad against Egypt
At the top of the Islamic Jihad, there is great anger at the Egyptian intelligence for the role it played a few hours before the Israeli operation against the organization’s senior leader Taysir Al-Jabari and his men.
A senior official in the Islamic Jihad organization says that Egypt betrayed the organization and that it was part of the Israeli game, according to him, 4 hours before the Israeli attack, Egyptian intelligence informed the Islamic Jihad that Israel was not interested in escalation. and that it would respond “positively to the demand to release Islamic Jihad operatives from prison.
The one who calmed down the Islamic Jihad was General Ahmed Abdel Khalek, the person in charge of the Palestinian file in the Egyptian intelligence who passed the messages to Khaled Al-Batsh, a member of the political bureau of the organization.
As a result of the fact that the Egyptian intelligence calmed the Islamic Jihad, it was not prepared for the Israeli air attack.
On the other hand, the Islamic Jihad is satisfied with the role of Qatar and the broadcasts of the Al-Jazeera channel during the latest round of fighting.
