GAZA CITY, PALESTINIAN TERRITORIES // A Salafist leader was shot dead in Gaza City during a confrontation with Hamas security forces on Tuesday, as tensions mounted between the Strip’s rulers and its extremist opponents.
The violence came as Hamas police and security forces stepped up measures against militants belonging to extremist groups, such as Salafists.
The incident occurred during an arrest operation in the northern Sheikh Radwan neighbourhood with Gaza’s interior ministry identifying the gunman as local Salafist leader Yussef Al Hatar, 27.
Wtnesses identified him as a Salafist leader while others said he belonged to a group affiliated with the ISIL militant group.
“Security forces barricaded the house and then violent clashes erupted,” they said.
Interior ministry spokesman Iyad Buzum said the fighting began when security forces went to his house to arrest him for unspecified “illegal activities”.
Hatar tried to flee, firing as he went. He also tried to blow himself up with a suicide vest but was shot dead before it detonated, Mr Buzum said, adding he had “tried to booby-trap his house”.
Pictures of the weapons were posted on the ministry’s Facebook page.
There have been growing signs of internal unrest in the territory between Hamas security forces and extremist splinter groups since last summer, when Israel and Hamas fought a deadly 50-day war in and around Gaza.
Experts have warned that the growing appeal of extremist groups, particularly among Gaza’s disaffected youth, could trigger a new explosion of violence in the enclave which has been ravaged by three wars with Israel in the past six years.
Since the last war, there have been a growing number of small-scale explosions in Gaza targeting officials and buildings affiliated with Hamas, the rival Fatah movement and international organisations.
Although there have been few claims of responsibility, they are believed to be the work of radical Salafists who have made a name for themselves as being unafraid to challenge Hamas, seeking to outbid them in the fight against Israel and the defence of Islam.
Salafists are Sunni Muslims who promote a strict lifestyle based on the traditions of early “pious ancestors”. In Gaza they have made no secret of their disdain for Hamas over its observance of a tacit ceasefire with Israel and its failure to implement Islamic law.
There have also been attacks claimed by groups purporting to be from an ISIL branch in Gaza, although such claims have so far been largely discredited by online extremist forums.
Last week, militants from a group called “Supporters of ISIL in Ansar Beit Al Maqdis” claimed responsibility for three separate attacks in May, including a rocket attack on a Khan Younis base of Hamas armed wing the Ezzedine Al Qassam Brigades.
During the war, dozens of young Palestinians without work or a future left Gaza to fight in Iraq or Syria, while others have been drawn towards militant groups involved in a deadly insurgency against Egyptian forces in the Sinai Peninsula.
But they have also been finding new recruits among the ranks of Hamas’s own security forces, many of whom are angry over the movement’s inability to pay them because of an ongoing financial crisis, Western experts say.
* Agence France-Presse
