Not so many years ago, al-Qa’ida’s Iraqi franchise, the Islamic State of Iraq, was enthusiastically announcing that Iraq would serve as the launching ground for imminent jihad to liberate Palestine. And as recently as last year, in the wake of the January 2009 Israeli war on Gaza, al-Qai’da central leaders Usama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri were refreshing the dream of an al-Qa’ida takeover in Gaza.

Within Gaza, where the Hamas leadership has consistently condemned the al-Qa’ida message, such rhetoric must always have seemed rather fantastical. Hamas gained substantive public support for its resistance to the Israeli offensive, in marked contrast to al-Qa’ida central, who contributed little more than words to the campaign. As for the possibility of a mass influx of foreign fighters into Gaza, well, it’s slim. Some Palestinian entrepreneurs are doing a roaring trade smuggling goods into Gaza from Egypt via the unsanctioned tunnels at Rafah, but the Egyptian authorities are scarcely likely to permit al-Qa’ida fighters across their borders into Gaza.

This is not to say that Hamas, or Gazans, can write off al-Qa’ida sympathizers in their midst.  Over the past few years a small stream of salafi-jihadi groups have emerged in Gaza. Many of them have proclaimed their allegiance to al-Qa’ida, though none so far has gained the movement’s lasting recognition. Most prominent amongst them were the Army of Islam – infamous for the kidnapping of British journalist Alan Johnson - and Jund Ansar Allah, both of whom developed a vociferous presence in the jihadi web forums and boasted of their rocket attacks on Israel, before being virtually wiped out in Hamas orchestrated massacres. In the case of the latter, Hamas responded to a declaration by the Jund Ansar Allah’s ideologue Sheikh Abdul Latif Mousa of the establishment of an Islamic Emirate in Palestine by bombarding the mosque where Mousa preached, leading to 24 people being killed, including 6 unarmed civilians, and Mousa blowing himself - and a Hamas operative - up with a suicide belt.

If Hamas has been quick in the past to crush unruly salafi-jihadi rivals, then the events of last week have again given cause for outsiders to question the leadership’s authority. Responding to Israeli airstrikes on Western Gaza in retaliation for rocket attacks launched from there, Hamas insisted that it is doing its level best to restrain groups launching rocket attacks. And if this is true, one has to wonder just how much leverage they have.

In a prescient brief published last month by Professor Yezid Sayigh for the Crown Center for Middle East Studies, “Hamas Rule in Gaza: Three Years On”, Sayigh, whilst stressing that the Salafist threat should not be overestimated, notes that

…Gaza remains one huge prison, with massive unemployment and crushing poverty. Hamas has the wherewithal and the stamina to endure as a movement, but it runs the risk that, in promoting a discourse of armed resistance and martyrdom and in encouraging the Islamization of society – as a means both of containing dissent and of deflecting internal pressure to resume active hostilities with Israel – it inadvertently encourages its core constituency to defect to more militant Salafist groups that it does not control, and which increasingly vie for recognition by al-Qaeda as its local affiliates.”

Israel, for its part, has tended to play down the idea of an al-Qa’ida threat, preferring to point to the menace posed by Iran, who backs Hamas, and against whom Israel would like to garner more robust Western support.  But by pursuing the blockade and isolation of Gaza it may well be increasing salafi-extremism.  Whether or not al-Qa’ida fighters can penetrate the Gaza strip becomes a moot point: the threat of even more violent extremism does not come from interference by foreign al-Qa’ida affiliates: precisely the opposite. It comes from isolation.