Radical jihadists loosely affiliated with Islamic State (IS) and, like IS, adherents of the Salafi school of Islam have carried out a string of attacks against Hamas officials and offices in Gaza. Hamas has retaliated by making arrests and destroying a mosque affiliated with the movement. Danny Rubinstein explains the dispute between these two terrorist groups:

The first and foremost ideological difference [between the two] is that Hamas is a national Palestinian organization. Its goal is to fight solely against Israel inside the borders of the Palestinian homeland. Hamas’s leader, Khaled Meshal, has declared on numerous occasions that Hamas will not operate outside of Palestine. Those declarations earned the group the opportunity to participate in the 2006 election in Gaza and enter into a unity government with Fatah.

This is not the case with the Salafist groups affiliated with IS. Their ideology is anti-national. They have attacked, and still are attacking, Muslim Brotherhood leaders—such as the founder of Hamas, Sheikh Ahmed Ismail Hassan Yassin . . . —who incorporate a national component in their ideology.

It is no wonder that those zealous, anti-national Muslim groups are flourishing in places where the national Arab leadership has failed. Arab nationalism has enabled the establishment of states within borders set by the imperialists. Now, when one by one those countries disintegrate, the Islamic State movement, unbound by national borders, rears its head. We see this happening in Iraq and Syria and to some extent in Libya and Yemen as well. Is this also the fate awaiting the Palestinians, who have not yet succeeded in establishing their own national state?

How did Qatar, an American ally, become the nerve center of the leading Palestinian jihadist organization? Natalie Ecanow explains.

When Jordan expelled Hamas in 1999, Qatar offered sanctuary to the group, which had already become notorious for using suicide-bombing attacks over the previous decade. . . . Hamas chose to relocate to Syria. However, that arrangement lasted for only a decade. With the outbreak of the Syrian civil war, the terror group found its way back to Qatar.

In 2003, Hamas leaders reportedly convened in Qatar after the IDF attempted to eliminate Hamas’s founder, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, following a Hamas suicide bombing in Jerusalem that killed seven people, including two American citizens. This episode led to one of the first efforts by Qatar to advocate for its terror proxy.

Thirteen years and five wars between Hamas and Israel later, Qatar’s support for Hamas has not waned. . . . To this day, Qatari officials maintain that the office came at the “request from Washington to establish indirect lines of communication with Hamas.” However, an Obama White House official asserted that there was never any request from Washington. . . . Inexplicably, the United States government continues to rely on Qatar to negotiate for the release of the hostages held by Hamas, even as the regime hosts the terror group’s political elite.

A reckoning is needed between our two countries. Congressional hearings, legislation, executive orders, and other measures to regulate relations between our countries are long overdue.