BICOM

A missile was fired towards Israel from the southern Gaza Strip last night. After initially triggering Israeli warning signals the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) announced that the missile fell inside Gaza and never reached Israeli territory.

The IDF responded by shelling a Hamas observation post in central Gaza as it holds Hamas responsible for any missile launched towards Israel originating from Gaza. Exact details have yet to be confirmed but it is likely that the missile was fired by a Salafi-Jihadi organisation intending to provoke a conflict between Hamas and Israel. In a sign of ongoing friction between Hamas and salafi-jihad groups, Hamas announced that it arrested four members of an ISIS cell including a senior operative named Nur Issa.

Hamas and the Palestinian Authority (PA) are due to continue reconciliation talks today in Cairo overseen by the Director of Egyptian Intelligence, Khaled Fawzy.

According to Palestinian reports, Saleh al-Arouri, who was appointed the new deputy leader of Hamas last week, is expected to lead the Hamas delegation. Al-Arouri was released from an Israeli prison as part of the prisoner exchange deal to free kidnapped Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, in 2010. Al-Arouri subsequently instructed the cell that kidnapped and killed three Israeli teenagers in the summer of 2014. He was later deported from Qatar and has recently relocated to Beirut where he is leading Hamas’s rapprochement efforts with Iran.

The Palestinian talks have not yet resolved the issue of whether Hamas will consider disarming and dismantling its military wing in Gaza. According to Hamas spokesman in Gaza Mushir al-Masri, “the issue of keeping arms has to do with the struggle against the Zionist enemy, and we will relinquish our weapons only after the homeland has been liberated, even if the price of that is renouncing the reconciliation understandings”.

Last week PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas told Egyptian television that he would not accept a Hamas presence in Gaza that was modelled on “Hezbollah in Lebanon” and that he would insist Hamas disbands it’s military wing. He was clear that if it did not disband then economic sanctions on Gaza would remain in place.