Why Islamic State has no sympathy for Hamas
The Islamic State does not regard fighting Israel as legitimate and calls instead for first "purifying" the Islamic world, including challenging Hamas.
Most of today's Salafist jihadist movements have no interest in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, for the time being regarding it as irrelevant. Instead, their call is to engage in intense, bloody confrontations involving bombings, executions, and suicide attacks against governments headed by Muslims and against Muslim civilians.
Al-Qaeda has followed this course for decades, and now the Islamic State (IS) is following in al-Qaeda's footsteps, fighting a brutal war across swaths of Iraq and Syria and in an effort to “purify” these areas through killings and population displacement. Once taking territory, it is not mobilizing the populations under its control in opposition to the Israeli military operations in Gaza. Why is this?
