Islamic State (ISIS) has declared war on Gaza-based Palestinian terror group Hamas, for its inability to prevent the U.S. recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.
An offshoot of ISIS in Egypt in a 22-minute video recently released, purportedly showed the execution of an alleged collaborator.
The man who is on his knees wearing an orange jumpsuit, similar to the footage of the group’s execution of American and British hostages in 2014, is accused of working with Hamas.
The video reportedly opened with footage of President Donald Trump announcing the Jerusalem move last month with ISIS urging its fighters not to relent but to subdue Hamas.
“Never surrender to them. Use explosives, silenced pistols, and sticky bombs.
“Bomb their courts and their security locations, for these are the pillars of tyranny that prop up its throne,” a knife-wielding man says in the video released Wednesday, according to the SITE Intelligence Group, which tracks extremist websites.
The jihadi group justifies its war on Hamas by blaming Hamas for cracking down on other militant Islamists and failing to prevent the U.S. recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.
The conflict between the two Islamist factions has been brewing for more than a year, according to the Washington Post.
Hamas has been more concerned with securing its border with Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula as a way to improve relations with Egypt – a country taking an increasingly conditional stance toward the group in Gaza.
The Hamas group, although sharing ISIS’s radical views and hostility toward Israel, tends to focus mostly on the fight against the Jewish State, while neglecting any calls for a global religious war against the West.
The ISIS offshoot in Sinai, however, is taking a more extreme approach, carrying out an attack on an Egyptian mosque last year that killed more than 300 people, the Post reported.
In Wednesday’s video, Hamas is criticised for “following in the footsteps of the disbelieving West.”
The latest call to war, however, is nothing new. In 2015, Islamic State militants threatened to oust Hamas from power, citing their lack of enforcement of Islam in the territory, Reuters reported.
“We will uproot the state of the Jews (Israel) and you (Hamas) and Fatah, and all of the secularists are nothing and you will be over-run by our creeping multitudes,” a member of the Islamic state in Syria says in a video from a few years ago.
