Islamism in the Gaza Strip
[4] For the first time since the Sudanese coup of 1989 that brought Omar al-Bashir to power, a Muslim Brotherhood group rules a significant geographic territory.
[5][6] However, Jonathan Schanzer wrote that in two years following the Hamas takeover, the Gaza Strip had exhibited the characteristics of Talibanization,[5] a process whereby the Hamas government had imposed strict rules on women, discouraged activities commonly associated with Western culture, oppressed non-Muslim minorities, imposed sharia law, and deployed religious police to enforce these laws.
[7] Israeli journalist Khaled Abu Toameh wrote in 2009 that "Hamas is gradually turning the Gaza Strip into a Taliban-style Islamic entity".
[11] Hamas campaigned for the wearing of the hijab alongside other measures, including insisting women stay at home, segregation from men and the promotion of polygamy.
[13] After taking control of the Gaza Strip in June 2007, Hamas tried to enforce Islamic law in the territory, imposing the hijab on women at courts, institutions and schools.
When Palestinian Supreme Court Justice Abdel Raouf Al-Halabi ordered female lawyers to wear headscarves and caftans in court, attorneys contacted satellite television stations to protest, including Saudi state media outlet Al Arabiya, causing Hamas' Justice Ministry to cancel the directive.
[9] In 2009, Asma al-Ghul, a female Palestinian journalist, stated that Hamas policemen attempted to arrest her under the pretext that she came to a Gaza beach dressed immodestly and was seen laughing in public.
"They accused me of laughing loudly while swimming with my friend and failing to wear a hijab," Ghul told a human rights organization in the Gaza Strip.
[20] In March 2010, Hamas tried to impose a ban on women receiving salon treatment from male hairdressers, issuing orders by Interior Minister Fathi Hammad and threatening offenders with arrest and trial.
In February 2011, according to the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, Hamas attempted to renew the ban, interrogating the five male hairdressers in Gaza City and forcing them to sign declarations that they wouldn't work in women's salons.
According to one of the hairdressers, police called the five into a room where an unrelated detainee was chained to a wall by his wrists and told to sign a pledge to give up their profession or face arrest and a 20,000 shekel fine.
[26][27] Polygamy was already practised in some Bedouin communities in Israel, and some Palestinians with Israeli citizenship, particularly in the Negev desert (Arabic pronunciation: Naqab) surrounding the Gaza Strip.
[33] The Palestinian novelist Zakariya Mohammed warned that Hamas' decision to ban the book was "only the beginning" and he urged intellectuals to take action.
[37][38] Beginning in October 2006, during the Fatah-Hamas conflict, and continuing into mid-2007, dozens of Internet cafes and music shops in Gaza were attacked by unknown assailants who detonated small bombs outside businesses at night, causing damage but no injuries.
Ramzi Shaheen, the Gaza police spokesman, told Ha'aretz in 2007 that the method of operation was always the same but that they had no hard proof as to who was behind the attacks and had yet to make arrests.
[13] Police said that no credible claims of responsibility had been made for the attacks, dismissing a statement that appeared on a news Web site in December from an unknown group with alleged links to Al-Qaeda.
[1][2][45][46] In May 2010, a previously unknown militant group calling itself "The Free of the Homeland" issued a statement criticizing the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), for running camps in the Gaza Strip "teaching schoolgirls fitness, dancing and immorality".
[43] In a separate incident in June 2010, a group of about two dozen armed and masked men attacked a UNRWA summer camp in Gaza.
[47] The "Islamic Endowment Ministry" created by the Hamas administration has deployed Virtue Committee members to warn people of the dangers of dating, card playing and immodest dress.
[9] The government has also imposed temporary closures on facilities like the cafes of the Crazy Water Park and the Faisal Equestrian Club where men and women were mingling socially.
[48][49] It was reported that young Palestinians in Gaza were being targeted by Islamist gunmen and Hamas security forces for wearing hair gel, with some of them being beaten and shaved against their will.
"[60] Sheik Saqer has asserted that there is "no need" for Christians in Gaza to maintain a large number of institutions in the territory and demanded that Hamas "must work to impose an Islamic rule or it will lose the authority it has and the will of the people.
[64][65] In 2015 – coinciding with the rise of the self-described "Islamic State" in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and in the neighbouring "Sinai Province" – the Hamas led government launched a campaign to combat “extremist ideology” in the Gaza Strip.
He wrote, "The Islamization that has been forced upon the Gaza Strip – the suppression of social, cultural, and press freedoms that do not suit Hamas's view[s] – is an egregious deed that must be opposed.
[68][69][70] According to Francesca Giovannini of the University of California Berkeley, a growing number of analysts have denounced openly the "systematic, massive and explicit efforts" at 'Talibanization' led by Hamas in the Gaza Strip.
[71] Israeli-Arab journalist Khaled Abu Toameh wrote in 2009 that Hamas is gradually turning the Gaza Strip into a Taliban-style Islamic entity.
[72]Director general of the Palestinian interior ministry, Samir Mashharawi, said to the London daily Al-Hayat: "Hamas aims to establish a mini-state in the Gaza Strip modeled on the Taliban [state] in Afghanistan.".
[73] According to Jonathan Fighel, a senior researcher at the International Institute for Counter Terrorism (ICT), the ideological and strategic goal of Hamas is to destroy Israel in order to build on it a Sharia Islamic Taliban-style state.
