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?

Information about a supposedly near-finalized hostage deal continued to trickle out yesterday. While it’s entirely possible that by the time you read this a deal will be much more certain, it is every bit as likely that it will have fallen through by then. More likely still, we will learn that there are indefinite and unspecified delays. Then there are the details: even in the best of scenarios, not all the hostages will be returned at once, and Israel will have to make painful concessions in exchange, including the release of hundreds of hardened terrorists and the withdrawal from key parts of the Gaza Strip.

Unusually—if entirely appropriately—the president-elect’s Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, has participated in the talks alongside members of President Biden’s team. Philip Klein examines the incoming Trump administration’s role in the process:

President-elect Trump has repeatedly warned that there would be “all hell to pay” if hostages were not returned from Gaza by the time he takes office. While he has never laid out exactly what the specific consequences for Hamas would be, there are some ominous signs that Israel is being pressured into paying a tremendous price.

There is obviously more here than we know. It’s possible that with the pressure from the Trump team came reassurances that Israel would have more latitude to reenter Gaza as necessary to go after Hamas than it would have enjoyed under Biden. . . . That said, all appearances are that Israel has been forced into making more concessions because Trump was concerned that he’d be embarrassed if January 20 came around with no hostages released.

While Donald Trump’s threats are a welcome rhetorical shift, part of the problem may be their vagueness. After all, it’s unlikely the U.S. would use military force to unleash hell in Gaza, or could accomplish much in doing so that the IDF can’t. More useful would be direct threats against countries like Qatar and Turkey that host Hamas, and threats to the persons and bank accounts of the Hamas officials living in those counties. Witkoff instead praised the Qatari prime minister for “doing God’s work” in the negotiations.”