A Palestinian Authority (PA) school has hosted a basketball game named for a terrorist and mass murderer.

According to Palestinian Media Watch, a non-profit organization that translates Arab media in the West Bank (Judea and Samaria), the Gaza Strip and eastern Jerusalem, the Al-Awael School for Girls hosted a “Dalal Mughrabi Cup” basketball game.

Mughrabi was a Palestinian Arab terrorist responsible for the 1978 Coastal Road massacre, in which 38 civilians (including 13 children and an American photographer) were murdered and 71 wounded. She was killed by Israeli security forces while conducting the attack.

The Al-Awael School for Girls is overseen by the PA Ministry of Education. The Al-Razi Cultural and Social Association, a Palestinian non-governmental organization (NGO), co-organized the “Dalal Mughrabi Cup.” PMW notes that “this NGO is a member of the Networks program under the Anna Lindh Foundation (ALF).” ALF is “‘an inter-governmental institution’ established under EUROMED, an organization consisting of the 28 EU [European Union] member states and 15 Southern Mediterranean, African and Middle Eastern countries.”

Mughrabi has been glorified in Palestinian Arab society for the Coastal Road massacre. As CAMERA has noted, PA President Mahmoud Abbas has praised Mughrabi (“Where’s the Coverage? Abbas is No Angel,” May 20, 2015).

PMW pointed out that in October 2013, the PA named a table tennis tournament after Mughrabi. That decision was made under Jibril Rajoub, a senior member of the Fatah Central Committee and head of the PA Olympic Committee. Rajoub himself—called “moderate” by some in the press—has described Palestinian terrorist attacks against Israelis, including women and children, “acts of bravery (“‘Moderate’ Palestinian Leaders Encourage Shedding Tears for Terrorists,” CAMERA, Dec. 2, 2015).”

PMW reports that 25 Palestinian schools have been named after terrorists.

A fellow terrorist who helped Mughrabi organize the Coastal Road massacre, Khalil al-Wazir (aka Abu Jihad), also has been honored by Palestinian officials and society. As a CAMERA Op-Ed noted, Al Quds University in Jerusalem hosts the Abu Jihad Museum (“Omissions that distort the truth,” The Hill, May 28, 2015). Like ALF, Al-Quds University receives EU funding, in addition to support from the United Nations and a partnership with an American university, Bard College in New York.

PMW’s report on the “Dalal Mughrabi Cup” can be found here. A listing of the use of sports by Palestinian officials to commemorate terrorists can be found here.

A March 28, 2016 analysis by the Investigative Project on Terrorism (IPT), a Washington D.C.-based organization that monitors extremist groups, found a “stunning increase in deaths caused by radical Islamic terror.” IPT says the threat from Islamic-rooted terrorism continues to grow.

IPT calculated that an average of 3,284 people were murdered in terror attacks from 2007 to 2011. The next year, 2012-2013, that figure jumped to 9,537. From 2014 to 2015, 28,708 people died in Islamist terror attacks—a 774 percent increase from the 2007-2011 statistics.

IPT’s report was compiled using research from a variety of sources, including the University of Maryland Global Terrorism Database. The Investigative Project notes:

“The growth in terrorist victims corresponds to a wider theater of operations for terror groups. From 2001-2006, the threat was dispersed in area and occurring primarily in 10 countries, including the U.S. and Russia. By 2014-2015, significant Islamist terrorist activity could be found in 18 countries, with most concentrated in Africa and the Middle East.”

Not surprisingly, terrorist attacks have also seen a marked increase.

IPT’s analysis detailed 493 terror attacks from 2007-2011, increasing to 1,440 assaults between 2012 and 2013. By 2014 to 2015, there had been 2,930 recorded onslaughts by Islamic fundamentalists.

The report identified the rise of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) as an “obvious cause” for the spike, but noted that the data also showed “the problem of Islamist terror is worsening beyond the reach of ISIS.”

The skyrocketing number of terrorist attacks and resultant fatalities is one of several trends identified in the report. IPT noted that Africa has become a “primary growth target,” with an increase that has been “led primarily by three Islamist organizations”: ISIS affiliate Boko Haram in Nigeria and nearby countries, al-Qaeda affiliate al-Shabaab, primarily in Somalia and Kenya and al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), which refers to north Africa.

The increase in terrorism also has extended across the Atlantic Ocean.

Noting a report by George Washington University’s Program on Extremism, CAMERA wrote on Dec. 7, 2015 that “Islamic terror in the United States is at a height not seen since the Sept. 11, 2001 al-Qaeda terror attacks that murdered 2,977 people” (“Washington Times Notes Record Terror Levels”). GWU reported that “fifty-six individuals have been arrested” in the United States “on suspicion of plotting or helping support” ISIS in 2015.

Identifying what it considered to be another trend, IPT said that Western interventions, such as U.S. and NATO operations in Libya in 2011 that helped lead to the ouster of dictator Muammar Qaddafi and his government, have inflamed instability. Failed states, or countries in which the reach of governments does not fully extend to its geographical borders, such as Nigeria and Pakistan, also were highlighted as being contributing factors to the growth of Islamist terror.

In addition to noting increasing terror threats in Africa, the report predicts that Thailand, the Philippines, India and Bangladesh will “become more susceptible to an increase in attacks due to their perception as soft targets.”

IPT also sees Europe’s security systems as being unable to respond to the “rising challenges associated with the mass migration of refugees. Violence in Europe will increase in size and scope as Islamists exploit its nearly unregulated immigration system and Muslim enclaves such as Molenbeek in Brussels become more widespread.”

Yet, Europe may be able to learn counterterrorist lessons from Israel.

A March 30, 2016 policy paper by an Israeli think-tank, the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies, stated that Israel can advise Europe on “strategies like effective intelligence collection, disruption of enemy money supply and interference with enemy access to the internet.” The report, “Israel and Europe After Brussels: What Insights Can We Share?” by former Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) Col. Dr. Eran Lerman, recommended extensive intelligence collection and data-mining as a foremost step in countering jihadi terror. Close cross-national cooperation and a “strong and dedicated” group of intelligence analysts also are emphasized. The analysts, Lerman noted, must be “people who are not afraid to speak truth to power.”

That truth begins with an acknowledgement that Islamist terror is increasing, claiming more victims even as the fight against it expands.

Last October, a British website, Lapido Media, published a dishonest little hit piece accusing Israel of “shunning” a Peace Studies Program at Bethlehem Bible College (BBC).

The main evidence used to prove that Israel was “shunning” this masters degree “peace studies” program at BBC was that a foreign student who was attending classes at the program could not get a visa to attend school in the West Bank. Here is what the article stated:

The Arab world’s first Master’s degree in Peace Studies – developed by a Bethlehem college – is getting the brush-off from a government whose commitment to peace is already being questioned from within the Jewish world.

Bethlehem Bible College (BBC) aims to train Muslim, Christian, and Jewish peacemakers to build bridges instead of walls.

But 24-year-old ‘William’, a Canadian, and one of five international students in the inaugural class, cannot obtain a student visa.

Instead he must come and go every three months as a tourist. Afraid of deportation, he shields his identity online and makes no mention of his studies to the authorities.

‘My fear is maybe they would become aware of what I’m doing and reject any subsequent tourist visas,’ William, using a pseudonym, told Lapido.

‘It has been a step of faith, but I figured I would just take the risk and do it.’

[NOTE: CAMERA is not revealing the identity of the student in question despite the fact that “William” is no longer shielding his identity online.]

The article makes clear that it is Israel’s fault that the student cannot get a visa. But a close reading of the article reveals, however, that the student in question never applied for the student. The article states: “William was advised by the BBC not even to try.”

In sum, Israel was condemned for not issuing a visa to someone who did not even apply for one and this condemnation was used to portray Israel as giving the peace program the “brush-off.”
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In “How to Stop Mass Casualty Terror Attacks: Take Violence against Jews Seriously,” published last December in Tablet, Liel Leibovitz observed that Western leaders, media and analysts have long been willing to justify murderous violence against Jews as somehow “justified” or at least “understandable.”

The piece, now even more clearly on point in the wake of the recent terrorist attacks in Brussels, explains of this mindset:

It’s the logic of deluded men and women who are trying to organize a chaotic world into rational patterns and who are therefore willing to accept the indiscriminate slaughtering of Jews as somehow understandable, the consequence of some ancient blood feud having to do with a land and a faith far removed from the daily realities of most well-heeled westerners. To that crowd, the murder of a Jew is deplorable but rarely surprising; real shock is expressed only when the very same terrorists, literally speaking, who have orchestrated the killing of Jews turn their guns on other Belgians or Parisians or New Yorkers.

To the many—in government, in the media, in academia—who still hold this morally repugnant worldview, to those who endanger the well-being of us all by failing to seriously investigate and prosecute attacks on Jews because these can somehow be explained away by some imaginary rationale, it’s time to say no more. Understand this: The very same people who are coming for the Jews will soon come for you, too.

Every father who is killed on a road in the West Bank in front of his children, every old man who is stabbed in Jerusalem with a pair of scissors, will be killed again in Paris, in Hanover, in Washington. Terror doesn’t know any national boundaries. It doesn’t care about anyone’s religion. It couldn’t care less about the nuances of Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations. Terror is a technique for attaining power, and it has its own logic, which is the logic of indiscriminate death. Jews are merely this demented logic’s first victims, but they are not, by a long shot, its last.

Note: This post was updated on April 5, 2016 to reflect more current information

An Israeli digital forensics firm reportedly is helping the FBI try to gain access to data believed stored in an iPhone used by one of the terrorists killed in the Dec. 2, 2015 San Bernardino, Ca. attack that murdered 14 people and injured 22 others.

USA Today reported (“New Twist in Apple Case Leads to Israel,” March 24, 2016) that Cellebrite, a company headquartered in Petah Tikva—a suburb of Tel Aviv—is working with the FBI to help access the phone. The paper noted that Cellebrite has associated offices in “Parsippany, N.J., and affiliates in Europe and Asia.” It also has a history of working with the FBI, having previously provided kits for extracting data from cell phones in 2013.

Cellebrite’s mobile forensics division has developed a mobile-extraction device that may enable the bureau to access the phone’s encrypted data without assistance from Apple. USA Today noted that “the potential for this hack enabled the Department of Justice to ask for an eleventh-hour postponement in its hearing over a court order, fought by Apple, that the iPhone creator write a software override to the terrorist’s phone.”

Private entities are not the only groups of Israelis working to forestall and investigate Islamist terror in the West.
The former head of the Israeli Defense Forces’ (IDF) military intelligence, Maj. Gen. Amos Yadlin, said on March 27 that Israeli intelligence sharing with Western counterparts had prevented additional terrorist attacks (“Former head of military intel: Russian army still in Syria,” Israel Hayom, March 27).

The Times of Israel reported on March 28 that the head of the U.S. National Security Agency, Admiral Michael Rogers, “paid a secret visit to Israel last week to discuss cooperation in cyber-defense, in particular to counter attacks by Iran and its Lebanon-based proxy Hezbollah (“NSA chief ‘makes secret Israel trip to talk Iran, Hezbollah cyber-warfare”).” Rogers, who also oversees the U.S.’s Cyber Command, met with commanders from the IDF’s 8200 intelligence unit, which focuses on signal intelligence (SIGINT) and code decryption.

As CAMERA has noted (“Where’s the Coverage? Iran Cyber-Attacked New York City-Area Dam,” Dec. 22, 2015), Iran, a country that has funded Islamist terror groups, such as Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hamas and Hezbollah, is alleged to have been behind hacking attacks aimed at both the United States and Israel.

In fighting the common enemy of jihadist terror and those who sponsor it, U.S. and Israeli national security and technology cooperation will remain an important if not always reported story.

Update: An April 2, 2016 Washington Post article, “FBI ponders sharing tool to help unlock iPhone with local law agencies,” noted: “The firm that helped the bureau—not the Israeli company Cellebrite, as had been widely rumored—charged a one-time flat fee, officials said. The bureau is not releasing the company’s name.”

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Rami Hamdallah, the prime minister of the Palestinian Authority (PA), acknowledged in a March 16, 2016 interview with German media outlet Deutsche Welle, that “torture happens” in PA prisons. Yet, his admission apparently received no coverage by the mainstream U.S. news media.

The PA official’s comments were highlighted in a policy brief by analyst Grant Rumley of Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a D.C.-based think tank.

Speaking on camera to Deutsche Welle, Hamdallah granted that, “Certain things happen, torture happens, but it is not the policy [of the Palestinian Authority].

As CAMERA has noted, (“Hamas Cracks Down—on Palestinian Journalists,” Jan. 13, 2016) torture of Palestinian Arabs in both the West Bank (Judea and Samaria) by the PA and in Gaza by Hamas, is not uncommon.

The Independent Commission for Human Rights (ICHR), a Palestinian group that seeks to promote “inherent values of justice, equality and human rights,” reports that over the last two years there has been a surge in complaints about torture in PA and Hamas prisons.

Torture by the PA extends past prison walls and has included the targeting of journalists and teachers, among others.

In December 2015, the Palestinian Center for Developments and Media Freedoms accused PA security forces of using “violent means” against journalists. Such forces “reportedly beat and detained [reporters]…preventing them from news coverage while inspecting and seizing their equipment” (“Group urges investigations into PA violations against journalists,” Dec. 28, 2015). ICHR’s director general, Dr. Ammar Dwaik, stated of the 782 complaints regarding torture of Palestinian Arabs by Hamas and the PA, at least 35 involved journalists who were detained. Fifteen of that number were “summoned for interrogation or briefly detained for posting controversial comments on social media, especially Facebook.”

One individual detained for a critical Facebook post, Ahmad al-Deek, alleged in a law suit against the PA filed last year that he was deprived of sleep and beaten with sticks for five days for criticizing the authority.

FDD analyst Rumley noted that “ahead of a Palestinian teacher strike in February [2016], the PA arrested and held nearly two dozen teachers.” As CAMERA reported at the time (“Journalist: Striking Palestinian Teachers Show PA Corruption,” March 9), the PA’s security crackdown and illegal detentions were to “hinder or prevent” rallies protesting corruption. Rumley also pointed out that “during last year’s student council race at Birzeit University …the PA had arrested and beaten” several students affiliated with rival Hamas, a U.S.-designated terror group that rules the Gaza Strip.

Yet, major U.S. news media have shown little interest in reporting allegations of PA torture—or admissions by the authority’s prime minister that those claims are not without merit. A Lexis-Nexis search of U.S. print news media, including USA Today, The Washington Post, The Washington Times and The New York Times, among others, showed no mention of Hamdallah’s acknowledgement that PA torture occurs.

Rumley noted that “Palestinians have little recourse in confronting the PA’s abuses” that indicate “the room for dissent in the West Bank is shrinking, and those who challenge the system continue to pay a painful price.” That price likely will continue to be paid as long as news media outlets fail to report human rights violations by the PA.

As CAMERA reported, many media outlets misapplied the Western label of “moderates” to those who gained parliamentary influence in Iran’s February 2016 “elections” despite evidence that the elections took place as real reformers continue to sit in Iranian jails, many would-be moderate candidates were disqualified and left off the ballot, and that the interests, policies and practices of the Iranian regime remain unchanged.

But The World Post, an affiliate of the Huffington Post, in an article with the headline “Iranian Vote Affirms Obama Administration Nuclear Deal” misrepresents years of Iranian action and American policy. The repressive and violent Iranian regime’s pursuit of nuclear weaponry is rationalized as follows: “Iran cannot be blamed for acting militarily when its neighbors and America do so as well.” The nuclear capability Iran seeks to obliterate Israel and massacre Jews is explained as a defensive action: “Iran retained an obvious incentive to move forward. Israel, already a nuclear power with a sizeable arsenal, threatened to attack Iran. Most of Tehran’s Gulf neighbors were hostile.”

In The World Post, Doug Bandow, a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute who used to write for the Web site antiwar.com that describes itself as “devoted to the cause of non-interventionism,” overlooks that Israel’s preparedness “to attack Iran” is actually a measure to defend its citizens, the first responsibility of any nation-state. The Islamic Republic of Iran is a hostile regime that frequently promises to “wipe Israel off of the earth,” even putting those very words on its test missiles — ballistic missiles that may be in violation of the nuclear deal Bandow praises as having successfully “pushed Tehran back from developing nuclear weapons and triggered a stronger fight for reform in Iran.”

Bandow writes that “so far Tehran is living up to the (nuclear) accord,” yet disregards a recent report from the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office that the United Nation’s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), tasked with monitoring Iran’s compliance may simply not have the capability to do so. In addition, Bandow ignores the recent resolution by the IAEA Board of Governors that directed the agency to “cease reporting on Iran’s compliance with its Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty obligations and past Security Council resolutions.”

The World Post may conclude that “moderate reformers did well” in Iran’s elections, “vindicating the Obama administration’s decision to try diplomacy after years of confrontation with the Islamic Republic,” and rationalize its desire for nuclear arms, but it does so in the face of overwhelming evidence that Iran violently suppresses dissidents, flagrantly violates human rights, and has a stated intent to destroy the United States (“Death to America” ring a bell?) and the State of Israel. There is nothing moderate about that.

—Rachel Frommer, CAMERA Intern

A spokesman for the Palestinian Authority’s (PA) security sorces has blamed the United States and Europe for the March 22, 2016 Brussels, Belgium terrorist attack for which the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) claimed responsibility.

On the day of the attacks that murdered 31 people, PA security forces spokesman Adnan Al-Damiri wrote on his Facebook page:

“Those who prepare the poison will taste it themselves, and today Europe is having a taste of what it prepared with its own hands.”

Al-Damiri’s remarks were reported by Palestinian Media Watch (PMW), a non-profit organization that monitors Arab media in the West Bank (Judea and Samaria), the Gaza Strip and eastern Jerusalem.

After claiming to offer a brief perfunctory condemnation of “terrorist acts everywhere in the world,” al-Damiri’s Facebook post makes clear that he blames the West for Islamist terror. He claims that “we Arabs are the ones who have been most severely burned by the fire of terror, which has been created and exported by the US and Europe since the Arab Jihad fighters in Afghanistan, and before that by exporting the Jewish terror to Palestine, supporting it and justifying it. Today, Europe is being burnt by its [the terror’s] fire in its airports and squares.”

Al-Damiri conveniently overlooked that Arab terrorists fighting under the banner of Islam existed long before the United States and its allies, including Arab countries such as Saudi Arabia, supported mujahiddeen [holy warriors] in the fight to repel the Soviet Union from Afghanistan in the 1980s. As CAMERA has previously noted (“Au Contraire, Prof. Picketty: Income Inequality Does Not Cause Middle East Terrorism,” Dec. 9, 2015), Islamist terrorism predates the period of Western involvement in the region. In addition, terrorist groups comprised of Arabs living in and near British Mandatory Palestine attacked Jews long before the recreation of Israel as a modern state in 1948.

Al-Damiri’s supposed condemnation of terrorism reads less believably when one considers that on Dec. 21, 2015 he called for Palestinian children to “water” the fight against Israel “with blood” (see CAMERA’s “Palestinian Security ‘Shares’ Call to ‘Water’ anti-Israel Fight ‘With Blood,’” Dec. 29, 2015).

PMW noted that the official PA daily, Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, echoed the spokesman’s March 22 Facebook post with a cartoon depicting “a person whose head is the globe representing the Western world is shown attempting to blow up the Middle East, but inadvertently blows up himself.”
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Unlike some news outlets and in contrast to some of its previous articles, in a March 20, 2016 article, The Washington Post eschewed improper terminology in reporting the capture in Belgium of a key Islamic State in Syria and Iraq (ISIS) member—properly calling a terrorist a terrorist (“Terror suspect’s capture in Brussels came after several watchful days”).

Washington Post reporters James McAuley, Michael Birnbaum and Souad Mekhennet detailed the process that led to the March 18 capture of alleged ISIS member Salah Abdeslam. Abdeslam was described as “the last known surviving participant” in the Nov. 15, 2015 terrorist attacks that murdered 130 people in Paris. He is suspected of being “the logistics chief behind the worst terrorist attack in the French capitol in decades.”

In their coverage, The Post reporters noted that a March 15 police raid on a “suspected terrorist safe house”—during which an Algerian with suspected ISIS ties was killed while resisting arrest—yielded information that led Belgian and French authorities to Abdeslam.

The Post reported that Abdeslam, a French citizen, was apprehended three days later in in “the city’s predominantly Muslim Molenbeek quarter.” The paper, in its own words, the paper noted that after receiving treatment for wounds suffered while resisting arrest, he was charged on March 19 with “participation in terrorist murder” and for “terrorist activities.”

CAMERA has previously pointed out (see, for example, “Martyrs—the New ‘Militants’—and Other Washington Post Word-Play,” March 10, 2016) the tendency of some print news media—including The Post—to use misleading adjectives, such as “militant” and “gunmen,” in substitute for the more accurate “terrorist.” CAMERA also has noted that “the closer terrorists get to Israel, the more likely they are to be transformed linguistically” to a “fighter” or some word that is less descriptive than the reality (“News Media Makeovers—Terrorists Are Militants Are Fighters,” March 11, 2009).

In the paper’s March 23 coverage of the previous day’s ISIS terrorist attack in Brussels, Belgium, The Post used “militant” on occasion, but still overwhelmingly employed “terrorist” to describe the murderers (for example “Bombings at Airport, on Subway,” “Obama faces new pressure to forsake his instincts” and “Bombs underline city’s status as a center of Islamist extremism”).

In his 1946 essay, “Politics and the English Language,” British author George Orwell wrote:

“Political language—and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservative to Anarchists—is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”

The crimes of Islamic terrorists are unworthy of respectability, and The Post deserves recognition for not providing them with much of it in these cases.

Hamas, the U.S.-designated Palestinian Arab terrorist group that rules the Gaza Strip, has a new leader, writes Avi Issacharoff, a Middle East analyst and journalist (“Inside Hamas, a bitter and very personal battle for control,” The Times of Israel, March 19, 2016).

Yahya Sinwar has “emerged” as a “new leader” of the terror group. Sinwar is based in the Strip and lives in the Khan Younis refugee camp. By contrast, Khaled Mashaal—frequently described by press and policymakers as head of Hamas’ “military wing”—lives in reported opulence in the Gulf country of Qatar. Terrorist organizations, of course, while not exempt from fissures and factions and engaging in division of labor, do not have discrete “military” or “political” “wings” as sovereign nations do—their complementary segments all support their terrorist strategies.

Sinwar spent 22 years in Israel’s prisons for terrorist activities. He was released in 2011 as part of the prisoner exchange for Gilad Shalit, an Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) soldier who was kidnapped in 2006 by Hamas and held hostage for five years. Issacharoff characterizes Sinwar as “a man who avoids the limelight” and “is considered a radical hardliner who inspires the loyalty of the leadership of Hamas’s military wing.”

Sinwar, one of the founders of the Izz a-Din al-Qassam brigades, Hamas’ armed units, opposed the exchange for Shalit, despite its leading to his release.

Issacharoff says that Sinwar’s release in 2011 “wrought a change in the structure of the entire leadership” of Hamas. The journalist claims that change is related to different priorities between Sinwar and Mashaal; Sinwar believes that “Gaza is not a stepping-stone in a wider strategy of taking over the West Bank and the PLO, as it is for Mashaal. Rather, Gaza is a separate and sanctified goal; the first and only entity where the Muslim Brotherhood’s doctrine holds sway.” This means that while Mashaal is willing to make temporary compromises regarding Hamas’ position in the Gaza Strip with the goal of making gains for the terrorist group in areas controlled by Fatah, the rival movement that dominates the Palestinian Authority (PA), Sinwar is perhaps less likely to do so.

Issacharoff reports that Sinwar differs from Mashaal in other respects as well.

As CAMERA has noted, (“Journalist Profiles New Iranian-backed Palestinian Terror Group,” Oct. 29, 2015), Hamas, including Mashaal, failed to support publically the regime of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad in Syria’s ongoing civil war—angering the terror group’s chief financial backer, Iran, which has been working to ensure that Assad stays in power. By contrast, Sinwar and his allies “refused to part ways with their friends in Tehran and Damascus” and have “kept in close contact with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard’s Al-Quds Force.” As a result, Sinwar has continued to receive Iranian funds although Mashaal’s attempts to gain support from Saudi Arabia and his opposition to Iranian proxies in Yemen led to a cutback in financial assistance from the Islamic Republic.

Hamas leadership also differs on policy regarding Egypt and Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). Mashaal and his deputy, Moussa Abu Marzouk, have been seeking to improve ties with Egypt by visiting Cairo and meeting with Egyptian intelligence officials. Issacharoff believes this is to counter the influence of Sinwar, who has been cooperated with and assisted Islamic State in the Sinai—a branch of ISIS, a U.S.-designated terrorist group.

Isaacharoff is careful to note that “Hamas is not about to fall apart, and the rifts are not unbridgeable.” Still, he believes that in Hamas elections this year, Sinwar is likely to gain influence and greater power within the Gaza Strip, perhaps at the expense of Mashaal and/or Ismail Haniyeh, a senior Hamas leader who lives in Gaza.