Islamic State militant was booted from Hamas

Issa a-Lakta, 23, previously filmed leery of a camel, threatened to destroy Palestinian group with his new pals

A camel-shy former Hamas militant, who was kicked out of the Gaza Strip-based group, has turned up as a member of the Islamic State group in Syria, where he has been threatening to come back and destroy his former organization.

His fighting cred is somewhat undermined by a separate video that shows him bested by a kneeling humped ungulate.

Issa a-Lakta, 23, from the Sheikh Radwan neighborhood of Gaza City, apparently left the Strip a year and a half ago to join the jihadists, Israel Radio’s Gal Berger reported Sunday.

Last week, a-Lakta featured in an IS video, armed and in uniform, with two fighters at his side, in which he threatened that if Hamas continues in its “heresy,” IS will kill all its members in Gaza, young and old.

In the video, published last Tuesday, IS accused the Islamist Hamas of being soft in enforcing religious law in the Palestinian enclave it controls.

“We will uproot the state of the Jews [Israel] and you [Hamas] and Fatah [in the West Bank], and all of the secularists are nothing and you will be overrun by our creeping multitudes,” a masked Islamic State member said in the recorded message addressed to the “tyrants of Hamas.”

“The rule of Sharia [Islamic law] will be implemented in Gaza, in spite of you. We swear that what is happening in the Levant today, and in particular the Yarmouk camp [in Syria], will happen in Gaza,” he said, in reference to the besieged Palestinian refugee camp near Damascus.

Lakta then appears and delivers his message of retribution to Hamas.

Palestinians responded by publishing on YouTube a clip from a few years ago, filmed on a Gaza beach, showing Lakta surrounded by a mocking crowd who jeer him for apparently being afraid to climb on a kneeling camel.

Posted by ‎גל ברגר Gal Berger‎ on Saturday, July 4, 2015

After a couple of attempts, as Lakta gingerly tries to mount the animal, the beast stands up, prompting the cautious rider to beat a quick retreat.

Hamas has been battling Gaza-based Salafist groups identified with the Islamic State group, which has rampaged across areas in Syria and Iraq, brutally killing anyone who stands in its path. Some groups have claimed recent rocket fire on Israel, in defiance of Hamas rule.

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