With Hamas constrained by a host of political and military factors, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the most prominent Palestinian terror group after Hamas, has upped its recruitment and propaganda efforts in the West Bank, analysts and former officials told The Times of Israel.

Filling a vacuum created by Hamas — which has faced grinding IDF pressure while its Gaza leadership deprioritizes the West Bank — Islamic Jihad has increasingly asserted itself in the northern West Bank, where the Palestinian Authority’s grasp is more tenuous than the rest of the territory.

With Islamic Jihad more closely supported by Iran than Hamas, more decentralized than Hamas and unencumbered by any pretense toward governance, any move the group makes toward West Bank dominance could prove more of an insidious challenge to Israel.

According to experts, the group will likely be harder to deter or decapitate, prolonging instability, further weakening the PA’s hold on the territory and raising difficult questions about the long-term effectiveness of Israel’s counterterrorism strategy, which may require a shift to more sustained military operations beyond the army’s already robust efforts in dangerous Palestinian urban settings.

The rise of PIJ, as the group is often referred to, could also give Iran a deeper foothold in the West Bank, analysts say.

Because Hamas has been constrained in the past by the need to maintain a veneer of legitimacy, balancing its terrorist activity with its political and governing goals, Tehran has historically been a more staunch backer of PIJ, which is fully dedicated to armed confrontation and has never claimed any mantle of being a legitimate political representative.

PIJ’s brand of “total, violent, uncompromising” resistance appeals to many young Palestinians, “especially when it’s also financially supported,” said David Koren, a former National Security Council official. “You can’t measure this electorally — they’re not running for parliament — but at the level of popular terror, they enjoy considerable sympathy.”

Effect of counterterrorism operations ‘waning’

Following the Hamas-led invasion and massacre on October 7, 2023, that sparked the war in Gaza, Israel took steps to ramp up anti-terror efforts in the West Bank, where Hamas had hoped to inspire copycat attacks.

These moves included heavy restrictions on Palestinian movement in the territory and assassinations of Hamas officials involved in West Bank terrorism.

In the northern West Bank, which has been a particular trouble spot for Israeli forces over the last decade due to the PA’s inability to tamp down terror activity, the army has also carried out large-scale counterterror operations, some of which lasted days or weeks and involve mass displacement of Palestinian civilians. The operations have typically centered around Nablus; Tulkarem, where a major raid was launched in early 2025; and Jenin and Tubas, which also saw large operations toward the end of the year.

But the effect of Israel’s counterterrorism measures “is waning, and these groups are resurging — especially Islamic Jihad,” said Joe Truzman, a research analyst at the Washington-based Foundation for Defense of Democracies who focuses on Palestinian terror groups.

PIJ was already showing signs of strength in the West Bank before October 7. The group led much of the uptick in violence and terrorism that began in the West Bank in the summer of 2021, said Truzman, adding that PIJ had more fighters on the ground in the northern West Bank at the time, though it remains difficult to pinpoint how many fighters belong to each terror group.

Israel has had some success in countering PIJ, but keeping the situation in the West Bank contained will require sustained focus given continued military activity elsewhere since October 7.

“Things are manageable right now. They’re not out of control like they were several years ago,” Truzman said, adding that in light of recent trends, “people should keep an eye on it.”

Much of PIJ’s activity lately has been focused less on terrorism and more on growing its popularity, including building up its ranks.

Some of PIJ’s most effective recruitment methods in the West Bank include delivering sermons in mosques and distributing posters glorifying “martyrs” killed in battle with Israel, said Truzman, adding that Palestinian youth are especially exposed to these practices in Jenin.

He also noted that PIJ’s designated social media accounts for the West Bank have been much more active than Hamas’s, bolstering PIJ’s perceived presence among Palestinians.

PIJ operates in a different fashion than Hamas, enabling it to create alliances on the ground that Hamas hasn’t managed to form.

Koren, who now leads the Jerusalem Institute for Policy Research, said PIJ has also “grown stronger as the actor that provides sponsorship and protection to armed gangs” such as Jenin’s so-called Brigade 313, an Iran-backed outfit established in 2021.

“PIJ often breaks through organizational barriers to create very pragmatic cooperation with local gangs and armed groups operating on the ground,” he said. “Groups responsible for very serious terrorist attacks at junctions, against settlers, and others. It shelters militias and armed groups, and its cooperation with them has become more natural.”

Such decentralized cooperation can make terrorist networks harder to dismantle, potentially requiring more frequent Israeli military operations in areas like Jenin and Tulkarem.

Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council in Washington, stressed that PIJ’s success in recruitment in the West Bank cannot be divorced from the territory’s dire economic straits. Prior to October 7, Israel gave hundreds of thousands of Palestinians work permits, allowing them to earn higher wages, but following the attack, almost all of these were frozen due to heightened security, harming the financial outlook of many in the West Bank.

While recruitment methods were historically more based in ideology, “nowadays, you can’t really recruit anyone without a financial incentive,” he said. “You have something like half a million unemployed laborers in the West Bank who can’t get work permits in Israel anymore. And so mass unemployment provides a significant opening for exploitation.”

Alkhatib noted that just because PIJ had an increased presence, it did not mean there was specific support for its brand of extremist ideology.

“There is support for anybody who fights Israel, the resistance, et cetera, broadly speaking,” he said.

Polling has consistently shown West Bank Palestinians, as opposed to their Gaza counterparts, favoring ‘armed struggle’ against Israel as ‘the best means of achieving Palestinian goals.’

Polling has consistently shown West Bank Palestinians, as opposed to their Gaza counterparts, favoring ‘armed struggle’ against Israel as ‘the best means of achieving Palestinian goals.’

Polling by the independent Ramallah-based Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research has consistently shown “armed struggle” against Israel as the most popular option for “achieving Palestinian goals” toward statehood among West Bank Palestinians, though a survey published in May 2025 showed that less than 50% support the option for the first time since September 2022.

In Gaza, negotiations have been more popular than armed struggle since September 2024, the pollster has found.

According to Alkhatib, one factor that put a dent in West Bank support for armed conflict with Israel was the IDF’s extended counterterrorism campaign Operation Iron Wall from early to mid 2025, which began in Jenin and spread to other areas in the territory, displacing some 40,000 Palestinians in the process.

The mass displacement was “a cautionary tale for a lot of people in the West Bank who realized that we really don’t want to turn our territories, our area, into another Gaza,” he said.

No political program ‘other than chaos’

Yet heedless aggression against Israel regardless of the consequences seems to be PIJ’s modus operandi.

“They don’t have a particular program other than chaos and resistance,” said Alkhatib.

Unlike Hamas, PIJ has no desire to lead the Palestinian people. Truzman, the FDD analyst, said PIJ “mingles in politics” but has no political wing.

Meanwhile, Hamas’s capacity to assert itself in the West Bank has been curtailed by its need to preserve its rule in Gaza, which has been devastated following the October 7 attack, said Koren.

“From the moment Hamas became heavily bogged down in Gaza — and also wanted to preserve its governing control there while absorbing severe blows, both military and economic — its ability to operate in Judea and Samaria diminished, especially financially and in terms of leadership coordination,” he said, using the Hebrew name for the West Bank.

At the same time, Israel has cut Hamas down in the West Bank and elsewhere by killing its senior leaders, including those involved in directing the terror group’s West Bank activity, said Koren.

Most prominent among these was reportedly Saleh al-Arouri, Hamas’s veteran West Bank chief, who was killed in Beirut in January 2024.

Arouri was considered a key link to Iran and Lebanese terror group Hezbollah. He was replaced by his lesser-known deputy Zaher Jabarin, who analysts say is viewed as less charismatic or effective than Arouri.

Jabarin, based out of Turkey, was seen as the mastermind of a string of botched bombing attempts that succeeded only in killing a single Palestinian attacker.

Citing associates of Gaza’s Hamas chief Khalil al-Hayya, Saudi outlet Al-Hadath reported in May that Hayya had accused Jabarin of “failing to complete the work” left behind by Arouri.

With Hamas itself split between pro-Qatari and pro-Iranian camps, the episode demonstrated the existence of possible deeper fractures within Hamas.

PIJ-Iran ties ‘more comfortable for both sides’

The financial and political constraints on Hamas have provided a space for PIJ, “which identifies an opportunity and seeks to exploit” the vacuum with help from Iran, Koren said.

Because PIJ’s “focus is narrower and purely military, it can allocate its resources more easily and carry out terrorism in Judea and Samaria,” he added.

From the outset, Iran’s ties to PIJ have been “more natural and more comfortable for both sides” than its ties to Hamas, according to Koren.

Hamas’s ties with Iran have known ups and downs, such as during the Syrian civil war, when Hamas allied itself with the predominantly Sunni rebel forces fighting Syria’s Iran-backed president Bashar al-Assad, who was toppled in late 2024. PIJ continued to support Assad, who had hosted the terror group’s leadership in Damascus for years.

“Unlike Hamas — which has significant constraints when it comes to deepening Iranian influence because of the Sunni–Shiite divide — Islamic Jihad, from its inception, has viewed the Iranian Islamic Revolution as a source of inspiration,” he said.

That means a continued rise in PIJ prominence could deepen Iran’s influence in the West Bank, making the territory into another battleground for the Islamic Republic to challenge Israel.

Like Hamas, PIJ is Sunni, but its affinity with Shiite Iran is alluded to in the name of Jenin’s Brigade 313, which derives from the number of people set to accompany the second coming of Imam Mahdi, a messianic figure in Shiite Islam.

Awdah TV, an outlet belonging to the PA’s dominant faction, Fatah, has said the number is commonly used by pro-Iran forces in the Middle East and shows the Jenin Brigade is itself an Iranian proxy. While the brigade also includes members of Hamas and other armed groups, it has been described in Arabic media as an affiliate of al-Quds Brigades, PIJ’s armed wing.

Among the terror attacks claimed by Brigade 313 was a shooting near the northern West Bank village al-Funduq that killed three Israelis and wounded eight in January 2025, as the brigade was being targeted by PA and then IDF forces in Jenin.

Speaking to UK-based Arabic newspaper Al-Araby Al-Jadeed in December 2024, during the PA operation, Jenin Brigade commander Nour al-Bittar dismissed PA accusations that his group was backed by Iran.

“If they claim that we have Iranian funding, then what about their funding, which comes from the United States?” he said. “Our support for resistance is not contingent on money or interests — it’s a patriotic and religious duty toward our nation.”

Alkhatib has written that Brigade 313 represents an Iranian attempt in the West Bank to “bring about the collapse of the PA and trigger a massive Israeli counterattack” in the hope that the violence would help salvage Iran’s regional terror proxy network, which has taken a blow since the October 7 attack.

Alkhatib told The Times of Israel that constraints facing Hamas amid the war in Gaza meant that PIJ was “much more useful moving forward as an Iranian proxy than Hamas.”

“Iran is looking at this… and thinking Hamas is constrained by a whole host of limitations, whereas PIJ is the only group that remains politically free,” he said.

If so, we have a request. 

Every day during the past two years of war and rising global anti-Zionism and antisemitism, our journalists kept you abreast of the most important developments that merit your attention. Millions of people rely on ToI for fact-based coverage of Israel and the Jewish world. 

We care about Israel - and we know you do too. So we have an ask for this new year of 2026: express your values by joining The Times of Israel Community, an exclusive group for readers like you who appreciate and financially support our work. 

We’re really pleased that you’ve read X Times of Israel articles in the past month.

You clearly find our careful reporting valuable, in a time when facts are often distorted and news coverage often lacks context.

Your support is essential to continue our work. We want to continue delivering the professional journalism you value, even as the demands on our newsroom have grown dramatically since October 7.

So today, please consider joining our reader support group, The Times of Israel Community. For as little as $6 a month you'll become our partners while enjoying The Times of Israel AD-FREE, as well as accessing exclusive content available only to Times of Israel Community members.

Thank you,David Horovitz, Founding Editor of The Times of Israel

1 AnalysisIsrael limps away from Winter Olympics overshadowed by bobsleigh team’s drama

2 Khamenei, planning for possible assassination, appoints Larijani to key role – report

3 Inside storyIDF escalates strikes on Hezbollah as fears grow of Iran-directed assault on Israel

4 US, Iran to hold talks Thursday as Tehran claims ‘good chance’ of diplomatic solution

5 Jewish hockey star Jack Hughes clinches gold medal for Team USA at Winter Olympics

6 Diver finds his second Crusader sword in 5 years off Israel’s coast

7 New study puts hominins in Israel 1.9 million years ago, rewriting earliest human migration

8 Israeli kickboxer beats anti-Israel Turkish foe

Palestinian Islamic Jihad

© The Times of Israel