The Islamic Jihad Movement in Palestine, also called the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), was a Palestinian Islamist terrorist organization which was founded in the Gaza Strip in 1981 by Fathi Shaqaqi and Abd al-Aziz Awda. The PIJ was originally founded in 1979 as a branch of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad movement, and it consisted of 8,000 former Muslim Brotherhood members who sought to actively fight against Israel and aid the Palestinian struggle. The PIJ was inspired by the principles of the Iranian Revolution, and it received Iranian backing. The group's leadership was exiled to Lebanon by Israel in 1988, and, in 1990, the PIJ moved its headquarters to the Syrian capital of Damascus. The group, aided by female fighters and aid workers, eventually moved on to form a group in North America under Sami al-Arian, a computer engineering professor at the University of South Florida. The PIJ lost its leader Shaqaqi to a shooting with a Mossad unit in a Malta hotel in 1995, but it grew in strength following the Second Intifada. Hamas distanced itself from the terrorist PIJ in 2012, and, in 2015, Iran ended its support from the PIJ due to its neutrality towards the Saudi Arabian intervention in the Yemeni Civil War; this ended the group's annual income of $70 million from the IRGC budget. The PIJ operated dozens of NGOs, mosques, schools, and free medical facilities in the Gaza Strip, and it radicalized children at young ages and encouraged them to carry out suicide bombings against "Zionists".
Gallery[]
