The Palestinian media took the results of the IDF’s “Shield and Arrow” operation against the Islamic Jihad in the Gaza Strip hard and they started a false propaganda campaign to present the operation as a failure for Israel and a victory for the Islamic Jihad.
This phenomenon also appears on Palestinian social networks and is evidence of difficulty in accepting the operational and moral damage to the Islamic Jihad, it seems that the national honor of the Palestinians has been greatly damaged.
Islamic Jihad, is now drawing lessons regarding the question of how to restore the organization’s intelligence capabilities and correctly read Israel’s intentions, and also how to restore its support in the Gaza Strip after, due to technical failures, about 30 percent of the organization’s rockets fell in the Gaza Strip, instead of in Israeli territory, and hurt innocent Palestinians.
The Islamic Jihad will now try to improve its position in the Gaza Strip, with the help of money from Iran, although it is very disappointed with the way the IDF managed to surprise it, it will restore the houses destroyed by the IDF bombings and compensate the families whose children were hurt by its rockets in the Gaza Strip.
Islamic Jihad made several major mistakes.
- Although Israel surprised it twice in the past in two proactive operations and eliminated its leaders in November 2019 and August 2022, the Islamic Jihad was surprised a third time in a row and Israel succeeded in the “Shield and Arrow” operation to assassinate the entire top of its military wing.
The Islamic Jihad did not correctly assess the intelligence and operational capabilities of the IDF, the leaders of the military wing were afraid to hide in tunnels and preferred hiding apartments, but the long hand of the IDF reached them.
Not only did the Islamic Jihad lose the leaders of its military arm, the IDF destroyed most of its rocket warehouses and rocket production workshops and now it has to start again to reach the military capacity it had, which amounted to about 4000 rockets.
- The Islamic Jihad brought the military blow upon itself and the residents of the Gaza Strip, it rushed to attack Israel with 100 rockets to avenge the death of Hader Adnan, who committed suicide in an Israeli prison through a hunger strike, and wrongly estimated that Israel would continue its policy of containment, Israel managed to surprise the leaders of the military wing while they were sleeping in their beds.
- The Islamic Jihad was not able to launch any effective attack against Israel by infiltrating its territory through tunnels or firing anti-tank rockets or attacking drones, the IDF prepared in time and correctly and located in advance all the military preparations of the Islamic Jihad and took the appropriate precautionary measures, It was once again proven that the Islamic Jihad is “transparent” from an intelligence point of view and Israel is revealing its plans and the location of its commanders.
- The Islamic Jihad ignored the position of Hamas, which sat on the fence and claimed that a round of fighting with Israel because of Hader Adnan’s death in prison is unnecessary and will only harm the residents of Gaza, so it paid a heavy price.
The Islamic Jihad obeyed Iran’s instructions, its leader Ziyad al-Nakhala stayed in Lebanon together with the head of the military wing Akram Al-Ajouri and the two followed the instructions of General Hossein Salami, commander of the Iranian “Revolutionary Guards“.
They disappointed Iran, which also failed to implement the strategy of the multi-arena battle against Israel devised by Qassem Soleimani, Hezbollah and Hamas in Lebanon and the Iranian militias in Syria refrained from coming to the aid of the Islamic Jihad and launching rockets at Israel as happened in the month of Ramadan.
The leadership of the Islamic Jihad made wrong decisions out of a sense of power and an assessment that Iran would back up its rocket attacks on Israel from other arenas, which did not happen, it did not learn the lessons from its previous rounds of fighting with Israel.
Hamas movement once again surprised the Islamic Jihad and sat on the fence, Israel had no part in the split between Hamas and the Islamic Jihad, the tensions and rivalry between these two organizations is constant under the surface and erupts in times of crisis.
These are two similar terrorist organizations with a common ideology, but Hamas is also a political entity responsible for managing the day-to-day lives of more than two million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, it did not want to lose the humanitarian reliefs that the Gaza Strip received, the open passages for the export and import of goods, the departure of 17 thousand laborers from Gaza to work in Israel and receiving the monthly financial grant from Qatar in the amount of 30 million dollars.
The terrorist organizations in the Gaza Strip do not have a single and agreed national plan for the war against Israel, despite the high coordination between Hamas and Islamic Jihad, they have separate plans and different considerations.
Egypt played an important role in reaching the cease-fire agreement between Israel and the Islamic Jihad, the Islamic Jihad that was outraged by its positions and claimed that they were serving Israel was forced to align and accept the Egyptian version of the cease-fire.
