The Founding of Islamic Jihad

The Islamic Jihad Movement in Palestine began as an argument among Palestinian students in Egypt in the late 1970s — most of them religious, some from the Muslim Brotherhood, all dissatisfied with a landscape in which the national movement was secular and the Islamist movement was quietist. Its central figure was Fathi Shiqaqi, a medical student at Zagazig University who had been a Muslim Brother in Gaza. He later described the founding in his own words: “We saw there were nationalists without Islam, and Islamists without Palestine. The Islamic Jihad Movement came as a solution to this problem.”

The nascent core was probably formed in 1980, while its founders were still in Egypt. Shiqaqi returned to Palestine in early November 1981 after finishing medical school and, with comrades who had preceded him, began organizing in the occupied territories — above all in Gaza, where he practiced as a doctor for two years at the Augusta Victoria Hospital. Against the Brotherhood’s patient institution-building, the PIJ preached immediate armed struggle with Islam as its guide, importing into Palestinian Islamism the revolutionary temper of the era — its founders were marked by the Iranian revolution of 1979.

The movement remained smaller, more clandestine, and more purely military than either Fatah or the later Hamas, and it never sought to govern. Its founding marks the moment “jihadist Islam” entered Palestinian politics as an organized force — six years before the Brotherhood itself, pressed by the intifada and by the PIJ’s example, followed the same road into Hamas. Shiqaqi led the movement until Mossad agents assassinated him in Malta in 1995.