366 Journal of the Spanish Institute for Strategic Studies N. 6 / 2015 interior, under the direction of Sheikh Yassin, and another for the exterior, known as the Political Bureau, under the leadership of Khaled Mashaal. In addition, there was the Majlis al-Shura (consultative council of the movement), comprised of prisoners to coordinate the actions and conduct of imprisoned Hamas members and, what is more important for the purpose of this article, the military arm – the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades – which, despite its full integration into the Hamas apparatus, enjoyed a certain degree of autonomy of operations,26 thus ensuring that the organisation could carry out armed operations, even when the political leaders of Hamas had been forcibly removed by Israel. Hamas and the Al-Qassam Brigades became the protagonists of the armed struggle during the period between Intifadas (1993-2000) in an attempt to boycott both the Oslo Accords and the institution of the Palestinian National Authority. The first suicide bombing by the Al-Qassam Brigades was carried out in 1994 in retaliation for an Israeli settler attacking devout Muslims as they prayed in the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron during the month of Ramadan. The practice of using suicide bombers continued for a decade, until the Second Intifada ended around 2004. Finally, between 2005 and 2007, a series of events forced Hamas to readapt its fighting procedures. Firstly, in 2005, the Israeli government of Ariel Sharon unilaterally decided to withdraw from the Gaza Strip and dismantle its settlements and military bases there in an attempt to revive the peace process on his own terms.27 However, the Israeli withdrawal was accompanied by the blockade of the Gaza Strip and its physical separation from the West Bank, thus making any kind of coordinated action between the two sections of Hamas impossible. This led the organisation, the central core of which remained in the Gaza Strip, to develop a new tactic based on the use of rockets, which we will discuss later on. Secondly, in another bid to revive the peace process, the Palestinian National Authority, under the government of Mahmud Abbas,28 initiated parliamentary elections. For the first time in its history, Hamas had decided to take part in and ultimately won an election, which triggered a wave of violence between the organisation and al-Fatah, the party traditionally in power, which controlled the PNA institutions, including the oversized security forces, because it refused to hand over 26 Ibid, p. 164. 27 BYMAN, Daniel. “A High Price. The Triumphs and Failures of Israeli Counterinsurgency”, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011, pp. 173-177. 28 Mahmud Abbas was Yasser Arafat’s prime minister from March to October 2003, when he resigned from the post on account of disagreements with Arafat and his patronage style of government. Elected president of the Palestinian National Authority on the death of his predecessor, he began a brief process of opening up to democracy through local and parliamentary elections in 2005 and in January 2006, although his position as prime minister of the PNA government had not been validated by any democratic process. See JAMAL, Amal. “The Palestinian National Movement: Politics of Contention, 1967-2005”, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005, pp. 165-170. http://revista.ieee.es/index.php/ieee
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