analysisIsrael-Palestinian Conflict

How deeply has ISIS infiltrated Judea and Samaria?

The process of radicalization in Palestinian society must be stopped before it breeds a new generation of genocidal terrorists.

Islamic State flags found in the homes of two eastern Jerusalem residents arrested on suspicion of plotting a major terror attack in the city. Credit: Israel Police Spokesperson.
Islamic State flags found in the homes of two eastern Jerusalem residents arrested on suspicion of plotting a major terror attack in the city. Credit: Israel Police Spokesperson.
Grisha Yakubovich
Grisha Yakubovich
Grisha Yakubovich is a veteran of the Israeli Defense Forces, former head of the civilian department in the Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT), businessman and adviser to the Council for a Secure America.

Since the Oct. 7, 2023, massacre, the State of Israel has designated Hamas as equivalent to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), or Daesh in Arabic. The radical Islamic organization formed a terror state in Iraq and Syria in 2013. Unknown to most observers, ISIS affiliates directly influenced and perhaps even helped precipitate and perpetrate the Oct. 7 attack. A news story that appeared on Rosh Hashanah this year brought this reality home: A Yazidi woman captured by ISIS in 2014 at the age of 11 was rescued from the Gaza Strip by the Israel Defense Forces in cooperation with others, after 10 years of slavery.

ISIS’s power is growing in Judea and Samaria

Wilayat Sinai and Hamas

ISIS has branched out to other areas of the Middle East, such as the Sinai Peninsula. As Salafi Muslims, ISIS members do not generally collaborate with the Muslim Brotherhood, viewing MB’s political Islam as apostasy.

ISIS mujahideen began to develop a stronghold in Sinai during the short term (2012-2013) of Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi, who was closely associated with the Muslim Brotherhood. Sinai ISIS (Wilayat Sinai, literally “Sinai Administrative Division”) reached a peak of activity around 2016, with 1,500 fighters; by 2022-2023 only between 100 and 500 personnel were detected.

Salafis are uncompromising in their belief in jihad to attain the establishment of a global caliphate. Yet, Wilayat Sinai has ties to the Muslim Brotherhood-associated Hamas. Despite differing approaches, Wilayat Sinai has collaborated with Hamas in weapons trade and smuggling.

After Morsi was ousted, however, the cooperative MB-ISIS relationship ended. Instead, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi worked to counter terror in Sinai, working unofficially with Israeli forces and with the Bedouin al-Arjani family, which heads an alliance of Bedouin tribes that controlled the transportation of goods to Gaza from Egypt.

Gazans who had joined ISIS during Morsi’s time returned to Gaza. ISIS signs and symbols, flags, gear and even the infiltration into Israel on Oct. 7 of individuals with non-Gazan Arabic dialects, as captured by Hamas body cams and cell phones, illustrate their influence.

ISIS funds its operations through a combination of extortion, kidnapping-for-ransom and robbery, alongside international donations, particularly from Africa and Asia. It has increasingly turned to virtual assets for transferring funds, as they offer greater security and efficiency compared to traditional cash transfers.

ISIS in the Judea and Samaria

On March 31, 2022, about 18 months before the Gaza war, Israeli social media influencer Abu Ali published a picture of a dead West Bank terrorist shrouded in Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad flags, together with flags or symbols of ISIS, surrounded by funeral attendees also wearing these symbols.

In another instance, Palestinian Islamic Jihad published three “martyrdom” posters of 13 terrorists killed in an Israel Defense Forces operation, divided by region: Jenin, Tulkarm and Tubas. In the Jenin poster, PIJ terrorist Saeed Wahdan wears an ISIS headband.

Again, on Oct. 4, 2024, at the funeral of Palestinian terrorists in the Samaria town of Tulkarm, dead militants were photographed shrouded in jihadi symbols.

Palestinian activism and initiatives in Islamic extremism are not new. After a mosque was bombed near his home village near Jenin in the late 1970s, Palestinian Sheikh Abdullah Azam, considered the father of modern jihad, emigrated to Afghanistan. There he met Osama bin Laden, and together they created Al Qaeda, the group ultimately responsible for the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the United States.

Part of a long-term process of radicalism in the Middle East, terror groups often develop out of mainstream movements. For example, Lebanon’s Hezbollah developed out of the multicultural Lebanese al-Amal Party. Additionally, radical Islamic groups both cooperate and compete. Al-Qaeda, for example, was once a branch of Islamic State, which later became ISIL and ISIS.

A similar process of societal radicalization may be occurring in Judea and Samaria. This may be why the Palestinian Authority, even while pressured by Israel for supporting terror, and by the European Union for accountability regarding its large donations to the P.A. (some 220 million euros) or, internally, from competing factions of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, still continues its security coordination with Israel.

Iran is smuggling weapons into and developing rocket warfare in Judea and Samaria, and is developing a presence in the border zone between Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and Israel which could prove a security weak point. Jordan’s King Abdullah II has allowed mobs to demonstrate against Israel in Jordan, and has spoken against Israel in the recent United Nations General Assembly session.

Israel still seeks to cooperate with Jordan and the P.A. to stabilize threats. Eventually, greater threats will come from the east, but Israel can work to ensure they are not emanating from Iran and ISIS. In a state of active, sectarian warfare and shifting power balances, ISIS thrives, since the modus operandi of its militias and ideological influence is to fill power vacuums. This, of course, poses a regional threat.

A Palestinian news website recently warned about the rising popularity of ISIS, especially in the refugee camps in the northern Judea and Samaria region, where Iran is also heavily invested. The article, “Warning against the penetration of the ideology of ISIS into the Palestinian mind,” written by Ahmed Ibrahim, reported that on Oct. 7 terrorists displayed ISIS flags, as seen in video footage in the southern Israel kibbutzim and towns that Hamas attacked. These symbols were likely left by Gazans who had joined the Egyptian Sinai branch of ISIS and were complicit in the massacre.

“Many Palestinian voices explicitly warned of the possibility of transferring ISIS ideology to the West Bank, in light of the ongoing operations in Jenin camp, Tulkarm and Nour Shams, or other camps spread across the West Bank,” wrote Ibrahim.

The article also notes that since Oct. 7, 2023, more and more photos and videos from the Jenin, Tulkarm and Nur Shams refugee camps of militants in ISIS uniforms have appeared online. Many camp residents fear the strengthening of ISIS as a threat to Palestinians, since ISIS supports a pan-Islamic caliphate and not a nationalist Palestinian state.

ISIS generally recruits through social media, using videos, audio clips, public statements and global campaigns calling for increased terror activity. Outside of Israel, successful ISIS attacks often encourage increased ISIS recruitment; the ISIS attack on Moscow earlier this year, for example, is speculated to have inspired operatives to plan the attack on the Taylor Swift concerts in Vienna in August 2024.

The Ahmed Ibrahim article called on the P.A. to distance “revolutionary” Palestinian youth, disillusioned with veteran Palestinian organizations, from ISIS ideology.

This call, coming from within Palestinian society, may seem somewhat ironic, since the P.A. itself has supported terror with its “pay to slay” stipends for jailed or killed terrorists and their families. Yet, despite Sunni-Shi’ite collaborations such as that between the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood Hamas and the Shi’ite Iranian regime, there is still very little support in the Arab and Muslim world for ISIS, except for a slightly higher degree of support in the Palestinian territories.

The P.A. also unintentionally provides fuel to the fire of extremism through its rampant corruption. Palestinian youth disappointed by Mahmoud Abbas’s ineffective Fatah faction are radicalized by Hamas’s and PIJ’s direct recruitment and ISIS social media contagion.

Hamas’s dictum of muqawama (resistance) posits that Israel only understands power through the force of jihad. On the other hand, the P.A. officially rejects violence, which has led to a situation in which Abbas and his Fatah are thought to have achieved nothing on the Palestinian street, with only a few strongholds within the P.A. Yet, rhetorically, like King Abdullah II of Jordan, Abbas continues to pander to extremists, for example issuing condolences for Nasrallah’s death, though Hezbollah once butchered Palestinians in Syria.

This is why strengthening the P.A. to weaken extremists may backfire for Israel, creating a dilemma: The P.A. itself also supports terror and intransigence. Israel may need to work with the P.A. as long as Abbas is alive, to stabilize the situation temporarily. Yet this is a provisional situation, like most security arrangements in the Middle East. Israel cannot revisit the failed Oslo Accords paradigm.

Iran vs. ISIS in Judea and Samaria

Likewise, the erratic movements of terror groups raise a question: Is Iran encouraging and supporting ISIS penetration into Judea and Samaria? Iran encouraged the infiltration of ISIS into Syria, which the Iranian regime then eventually attacked in 2017. While Iran pushes weapons into Judea and Samaria to prop up radical Palestinian movements to threaten Israel, ISIS itself opposes these movements. Sunni ISIS also expresses disdain for the Iranian regime, viewing Shi’ites as infidels. Yet, in the past, as demonstrated above, there have been some collaborations of convenience between Islamist groups under the common banner of “jihad,” with different motivations for each group.

In this unpredictable configuration, recent Israeli victories in Lebanon may provide a unique opportunity. With the weakening of Hezbollah, local Sunnis, Druze and Christian Lebanese may be motivated to establish a new state on Israel’s northern border. On the other hand, a weak Hezbollah may allow a place for ISIS to enter. Assad’s militias are not strong enough to fight ISIS. Israel, in that case, may have to create a stronger coalition with Egypt, Jordan, the United States and France, and empower other forces that stand against ISIS radicalism. In addition, the process of radicalization in Palestinian society must be stopped before it breeds a new generation of genocidal terrorists, the likes of which were witnessed on Oct. 7, a toxic mix of Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorists with ISIS Sinai, who wish to revisit the Oct. 7 atrocities on the Jews of Judea and Samaria.

Originally published by the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs.

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