THE mosque was empty save for three pairs of shoes, the poster of a bearded dead man and a roomful of violent intent.

Less than two minutes’ drive away their fellow Islamists in Hamas were squeezing pinstriped trousers behind new desks and ministerial cars, to the barely disguised scorn of these hard-eyed Islamic Jihadists sitting in a windowless annexe in Gaza City.

“There will forever be conflict. It is not going to be solved soon and it won’t be solved with the ballot box,” the leader said, his minders listening for Israeli helicopters and spotter drones overhead.

“We as Islamic Jihad don’t believe that the step Hamas has taken to democracy and elections will take us to the end of the struggle. Our ideology, through the way we understand Islam, is that our struggle will only end with the end of the State of Israel. For us it is an existential struggle, it is either us or them.”

Stark, uncompromising and with the utter clarity of the fundamentalist, this was the Islamic Jihad world view spelt out to The Times by its fighters in Gaza just days before yesterday’s bombing.

Older, but smaller than Hamas, Islamic Jihad is rejectionist to the core. Having denounced Yassir Arafat for signing peace agreements with Israel in the mid-1990s, a decade later it spurned the elections that swept Hamas to power...