Hamas Iran Briefing - Henry Jackson Society

The Henry
Jackson Society
A Strategic Briefing
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http://www.henryjacksonsociety.org
IRAN-HAMAS RELATIONS:
The growing threat from a radical religious coalition
Executive Summary: Hamas’ coup against the
Palestinian Authority in Gaza in May 2007 was
a monumental event, not just for the
Palestinians, but also the Middle East. Iran, the
proud sponsor of Hezbollah, launched a
successful war against Israel in Lebanon
during the previous summer, and was once
again signally its intentions through the
actions of its Palestinian client. As such, it has
taken on the behaviour of regional hegemon.
Indeed, Iran’s rhetoric in the past few years
has made clear that its leadership views itself
as the leader of a bloc of Third World countries
that actively oppose the West and wish to
harm its interests, in Iraq and elsewhere, in
every conceivable way. One central aspect of
Iran’s ambitions is its growing alliance with
Hamas, a relationship dating back to the first
official meeting between both in December
1990. These ties grow closer and more
intimate, particularly after August 2005, when
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad came to power. This
was followed by Hamas’ victory in elections in
the Palestinian territories in January 2006.
The coup launched by Hamas against the
Palestinian Authority in Gaza in May 2007
more than a year after the organisation
won the Palestinian elections, was a
monumental event, not just for the
Palestinians, but for the Middle East as a
whole. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s Iran, the
proud sponsor of Hezbollah who
launched a successful war against Israel
in Lebanon during the previous summer,
was once again signaling, through the
actions of its Palestinian client, that it has
taken on the behavior of a regional
hegemon. Indeed, Iran’s rhetoric and
actions in the past few years made clear
that its leadership views itself as the
leader of a bloc of Third World nations
that actively oppose the West and wishes
to harm its interests, in Iraq and
elsewhere, in every way conceivable way.
One central aspect of Iran’s hegemonic
ambitions is its growing alliance with
Hamas. This relationship dates back to
December 1990, when Hamas’ leaders
were invited by the Iranian government
for the first known time on an official visit
for a conference on the Palestinian
uprising. 1 The ties between the two grow
much closer and more intimate, however,
[1]
only after August 2005, when Iran held
elections bringing Ahmadinejad to power.
In January 2006 Hamas was swept into
power in elections held in the Palestinian
territories. 2 This paper analyses the
implications of the close radical religious
coalition between Iran and Hamas to the
West and its allies.
Hamas’ pan-Islamic agenda
Hamas is committed to basic principles
from which it has not deviated even when
it joined forces with the Palestinian
Authority to form a joint short-lived,
democratically elected government in
2006. The key principles of the Hamas
government included:
•
•
Adherence to its charter, which
maintains that jihad is the only
means by which the entire territory of
Palestine – including Israel proper -should be liberated.
Refusal to recognise Israel’s
existence under any circumstances –
even if Israel withdraws to the 1967
borders.
•
No negotiations with Israel. Hamas
acknowledges the possibility for
negotiations only if Israel withdraws
to the 1967 border and if Palestinian
refugees are offered the right of
return to Israel proper and their full
property is restored. The Israeli
government states that such a
fulfilment of the right of return is
tantamount to the destruction of the
state of Israel as a Jewish state.
Utilising all forms of ‘resistance’
namely violence and terrorism
including the use of suicide
bombings against civilians as the
primary means to achieve Hamas’
political objectives.
The founding of an Islamic state
ruled in accordance with Sharia
(Islamic law) in which democracy is
eliminated.
The Hamas-Iran relationship:
Looking for the money trail
The relationship between Iran and Hamas
went through three stages. 3 In the first
stage, in the late 1980s, the relations
were marginal. During this period Iran’s
attention was focused on rallying Shiite
support in the Gulf, encouraging and
sustaining international terror and
building up Hezbollah—its Shiite arm in
•
Lebanon. During this period Hamas, a
Sunni organisation, had little to do with
Iran, which showed clear sectarian
preference for its Shiite clients. Hamas
was also antagonised by Iran’s support
for its Palestinian radical Islamist rival,
•
Islamic Jihad, which Hamas viewed as a
chief competitor for support in the
Palestinian street.
The second stage began with
the invasion of Iraq in 1991. As a result of
Hamas is not simply a Palestinian
Iraq’s weakened standing following the
liberation movement. It is more than
first Gulf War, Iran started to view itself as
anything else a pan-Islamic movement
a budding regional hegemon and a
that like its mother organisation, the
prospective leader of the Third World. Its
Muslim Brotherhood, views itself as part
ties to Hamas grew substantially stronger
of a global Islamist movement. Hamas
after October 1992, when a Hamas
traces its link to the Muslim Brotherhood
delegation led by Dr. Musa Abu Marzuk
founder Hasan al Banna and his son-inwas invited to Teheran for meetings with
law, the Egyptian Said Ramadan, who in
key Iranian figures. Unconfirmed reports
the 1940s had direct authority over the
claim that as a result of these meetings,
activities of the Brotherhood activities in
Iran promised to provide Hamas with an
Palestine. This connection continues to
annual $30 million subsidy as well as
this day. Hamas lacks an authoritative
weapons and advanced military training
religious leadership; it continues to
at revolutionary guard facilities in Iran,
depend on non-Palestinian religious
Lebanon, and Sudan. 4 Indicative of the
personalities residing abroad to issue
deepening relationship, Hamas opened
rulings of Islamic law. One of them is
Yusuf al Qaradawi, an Egyptian residing in an office in Teheran in 1993 and
announced that Iran and Hamas share an
Qatar. Qaradawi is the purveyor of the
Islamic rulings permitting Hamas to carry ‘identical view in the strategic outlook
toward the Palestinian cause in its Islamic
out suicide bombings.
dimension.’ 5 The new era of a warmer
Hamas’s pan-Islamic worldview
Hamas-Iran
relationship followed a
extends beyond its contacts with other
pan-Islamic movements. Hamas not only change in Iranian self-perception from
what Hillel Frisch called, ‘a religious
seeks money from the greater Muslim
Bolshevik revolution’ into a ‘Stalinisation
world for its operations, but also its
of Iranian politics.’ 6 In the Stalinisation
covenant calls on Muslim countries
period, Iran started to view itself as a
surrounding Israel to ‘open their borders
radicalised state power and began its
to Jihad fighters from among the Arab
search for like-minded clients in the
and Islamic people.’ Although the
region. Yet even in this period, Iran stilled
organisation has not been able to recruit
viewed Hamas as a relatively minor
foreign Islamic jihad fighters to its cause,
regional player since it enjoyed only
Palestinian have played a considerable
role in the global jihad. This was the case, 14-18 percent support within the
Palestinian population. Moreover, Hamas
for example, with Abdallah Azzam who
looked weak to Iran after its expulsion
taught in Saudi Arabia and was an
from Jordan in 1999 and following its
associate of Osama bin Laden.
In this and in other ways, Hamas division into two branches in the West
Bank and Damascus. Because of these
is not simply a local Palestinian
limitations on Hamas’ power during this
movement, but rather aspires to become
period (1992-2000), Iran chose to invest
a driver of radicalised Islam, despite the
in Hezbollah, which was strengthening its
fact that even at present its activities are
position in Lebanon. Iran continued to
limited to Palestine. The organisation
support Hamas during this period, but
draws from both the Palestinian struggle
only to a degree.
and the rising wave of Islamic radicalism
The third stage of the Iranianglobally. For this reason, it is not a bridge Hamas relationship transformed the loose
too far for Hamas to accept Iranian
financial and military arrangements into a
patronage, ideological guidance, and
full-blown alliance. This stage followed
support.
the 2003 AMERICAN invasion of Iraq,
[2]
Palestinian violence since 2000, Arafat’s
death in 2004, and Hamas’ electoral
victory in January 2006. These events,
and particularly Hamas’ rise to power,
demonstrated to Iran that Hamas could
become a more useful partner in helping
Teheran realise its quest for regional
hegemony. The new Hamas government
which soon after coming to power found
itself almost completely isolated
internationally, gravitated toward Iran
because both regimes shared an
ideological Islamist Weltanschauung and
because Tehran offered a lifeline to the
Hamas’ leadership which was otherwise
cut-off from other means of support. In
December 2006, Palestinian Prime
Minster Ismail Haniyeh stated publicly
that ‘Iran constituted ‘stategic depth’ for
the Palestinians’, the first time any
declaration of support for Iran had been
made openly by Hamas’ leadership. 7
Hamas’s ties to Iran during this period
have become so close that the
intelligence chief of the rival PA
government speculated that Iran
masterminded and commended the
Hamas’s coup against the Palestinian
Authority in June 2007 and its violent
takeover of Gaza.8 According to some
analysts, Iran purposely fostered the
relationship in order that the ‘final word’
on matters regarding Israel would be
Teheran’s, akin already to its relationship
with Hezbollah vis-à-vis Lebanon. 9
Following the money trail: Iranian
financial support to Hamas
The central way in which Iran exercises
its influence over Hamas is through the
transfer of funds to its leadership. Iran is
Hamas’s main backer, but is not its only
source of support. Other, less generous,
financial backers include the Arab states
of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Kuwait.10
Hamas also collects funds in the form of
contribution or levies from its supporters.
It purportedly imposes a religious tax
(zakat) of 2.5 percent on the wages of its
members in the territories, sometimes
threatening violence upon failure to
comply. 11
Teheran, however, remain
Hamas’s central source of revenue. As
mentioned previously, since 1993 Hamas
has received an annual subsidy of
approximately $30 million in addition to
military training from Iran. Reports
indicate that since then Iranian funding to
the organisation has increased
significantly. In January 1995, in a
testimony before the American Senate
Intelligence Committee, the outgoing
Director of the Central Intellligence
Committee, James Woolsey, said that
Iran provided more than $100 million to
Hamas without giving a time period over
which those funds have been provided. 12
The relationship became gradually
stronger over the next decade and in
February 2006 Farhat Assad, Hamas’s
spokesman in the West Bank, announced
that Iran told Hamas’s leader, Khaled
Mashaal that Iran ‘was prepared to cover
the entire deficit in the Palestinian budget,
and [to do so] continuously.’ 13
Iranian financial support to
Hamas substantially increased after the
organisation’s elections victory in August
2005. Immediately following the elections
the group’s Syria-based leader, Khaled
Mashaal, visited Iran and re-affirmed the
ideological affinity between Hamas and
its Persian mentor and their joint agenda
of advancing radical Islam. ‘Just as
Islamic Iran defends the rights of the
Palestinians,’ he said, ‘we defend the
rights of Islamic Iran. We are part of a
united front against the enemies of
Islam.’ 14 The financial expression of the
close relationship soon followed. In the
same month Iran pledged aid to the new
Hamas-led Palestinian government and
by November claimed that it has already
given $120 million.15 During a visit by
Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Ismail
Haniyeh to Tehran in December 2006, Iran
decided to boost its ties to Hamas and
pledged $250 million in aid as
compensation for the Western boycott.
Unlike previous grants this transfer of
money was to continue on a regular basis
to cover various PA expanses. 16 The
Iranian funding was designated in part to
pay wages for civil servants and
members of the security forces affiliated
with Hamas, as well as to construct
camps for the security forces and to
compensate Palestinian families that lost
their homes as a result of Israeli military
operations. 17 Saudi Arabia also promised
assistance to the Palestinian Authority but
demanded that Hamas accept the Arab
peace initiative and, increasingly, that it
severs itself from the Iranian influence—a
relationship that elicits great concern
among Arab countries. 18
Iran’s support of Hamas at this
period was not limited only to financial
aid for domestic purposes. Hamas’
interior minister Said Sayyam visited Iran
and Syrian in October 2006 where he
received generous pledges of financial
and military aid to improve the
operational level of Hamas’ military wing,
the Izz a-Din al-Kassam brigade. The
commander of Hamas’ security force,
Jamal Isma’il Daud Abdallah, also known
as Abu Ubaida Al-Jarrah, has stated that
Iran would train Palestinian operatives in
its police training camps. 19
Following Hamas’s violent
takeover of Gaza in June 2007, when
Hamas had lost nearly all of its sources of
support, Iranian funds continued to
infiltrate into Gaza despite international
attempts to isolate the regime. Hamas
and Iran simply found new and unique
ways to transfer the money. A glimpse
into the new methods employed by
Hamas and Iran presently was provided
by Hamas hard-liner, Mahmoud Zahar,
who was quoted in June as telling a
German news magazine that he had
personally carried $42 million in cash
from Iran across the Gaza-Egypt border.
Iran’s strategy in the Levant
The strengthening of the alliance with
Hamas is a key part of a larger Iranian
strategy in the Levant. Since entering the
Stalinist phase of its revolution, Iran
employed a strategy of acquiring
powerful regional clients through which it
could carry its strategic and political goal
of seeding Islamic revolution in Sunni
Arab countries. This strategy is intended
to engender the necessary conditions for
the emergence of a modern super power
caliphate to spearhead a holy jihad
against the West, most notably the United
States and Israel. Iran seeks clients with
whom it shares an ideological outlook.
Hamas fits this description since it does
not seek an Islamic Palestinian state in
the West Bank and Gaza only, but rather
seeks to create an Islamic state to
replace Israel and take over territories
more broadly in much of the Levant.
Likewise, Iran’s client Hezbollah,
operating in Lebanon, is not driven by
local considerations alone but chiefly by
the strategic ambitions of its primary
state sponsor, the Islamic Republic of
Iran.
Iran’s regional clients, most
notably Hezbollah and Hamas, allow Iran
to foment conflict in the region through
proxy means. The prime example for this
strategy has been the Israel-Hezbollah
war waged in Lebanon in the summer of
2006. Hamas’ kidnapping of an Israeli
soldier and its rockets assaults against
southern Israel in June 2006 triggered in
part Hezbollah’s kidnapping of two IDF
soldiers in northern Israel followed by
rocket attacks from southern Lebanon in
July which brought about the second
Lebanon war. In many ways this war, in
which the IDF’s performance was
lackluster across the board, can be
described as the First Israeli-Iranian war.
Iran has also been able to use its
clients to destabilise regional
governments. Even after the Cedar
revolution in March 2005 that forced
Syrian forces out of Lebanon, Lebanon
still had to address the destabilising
effects of the Hezbollah’s military
presence in south. The second IsraeliLebanese war weakened the Lebanese
government and threatened the
democratic rule in the country. Likewise,
Hamas’ electoral victory in the Palestinian
territories so destabilised Palestinian
politics that it eventually led to a Hamas
coup against the PA and its hostile
takeover of Gaza in June 2007.
In both of these cases, Iran used
its clients to carry out a strategy of
destabilising the Levant. Lebanon is still
threatened by Hezbollah as is Israel’s
northern border. Despite the heavy losses
that the organisation suffered during the
war, reports indicate that it is rebuilding
and rearming rapidly and will soon be
able to pose an even greater threat to
Israel than previously thought. Hamas,
through its growing base in Gaza, not
only continues to threaten the PA in the
[3]
West Bank, but also now threatens to
destabilise Egypt, which has a significant
population sympathetic to the Muslim
Brotherhood, Jordan, where there is a
large Palestinian population as well as
sympathy for the Muslim Brotherhood,
and Israel, which now finds itself
outflanked and wedged between
Hezbollah in the north and Hamas in the
south.
More recently Iran has also
employed a Sunni proxy group—Fatah al
Islam—in Lebanon to further its strategy
of weakening the Lebanese government.
Fatah al Islam is a pro-Syrian Palestinian
Islamist group that, according to
Lebanese and Israeli officials, is
supported and directed by Syria and Iran
and has ties to al Qaeda. On 20th May
2007 violence broke out between Fatah al
Islam and the Lebanese government after
investigations into a bank robbery ended
in a standoff between the Lebanese
Armed Forces and Fatah al Islam in a
Palestinian refugee camp near Tripoli. Iran
timed its attack to coincide with the
Lebanese government's petition to the
UN Security Council to establish an
international tribunal to prosecute the
suspected killers of former Prime Minister
Rafik Hariri, assassinated on 14th
February 2005. But the Fatah al Islam
attack failed to intimidate the government
of Lebanon into withdrawing its request
and allowing Syria, Iran’s closest strategic
ally, to evade international scrutiny.
Despite the bloodshed, the Security
Council voted on 30th May 2007 to
establish a tribunal.
Iran employs it clients as a part
of a greater effort to seek regional
domination both in Arab Shiites and Arab
Sunni communities that it hopes to
penetrate and incite. Various Sunni Arab
regimes fear Iran’s growing influence
among the various Shiite communities of
the Middle East and that a radical Shiite
crescent could emerge and topple
moderate Arab states. King Abdallah II of
Jordan first sounded the alarm in
December 2004 when he spoke about a
rising Shiite crescent that would
overwhelm the Sunni Arab world. This
crescent would encompass Iran, the
newly empowered Shiite majority in Iraq,
Syria whose ruling Alawite minority elite
are recognised as Shiite by some Shiite
clerics and finally Lebanon whose Shiite
population is growing and where
Hezbollah’s influence is becoming more
pervasive. Echoing Abdallah’s concerns,
Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak stated
in April 2006 that ‘the Shiites are always
loyal to Iran and not to the countries in
which they live.’ 20
Iran’s outreach into Shiite
community is only part of the threat that
the Arab world perceives and that the
West should be concerned about
presently. Iran has revealed its readiness
to work in conjunction with Sunni
Islamists in order to further its ambitions.
Iran has not limited itself to Sunni
Palestinian groups like Hamas and
Islamic Jihad, but has reached out to
Sudan’s Sunni radical leader Hasan
Turabi through its Lebanese proxy in the
1990s. 21
Further evidence of Iran’s
willingness to cooperate with Sunni
radicals when it furthers its purposes can
be found in the 9/11 commission report
which talks about Iran’s cooperation with
al Qaeda: ‘Iran facilitated the transit of al
Qaeda members into and out of
Afghanistan before 9/11, and… some of
these were future 9/11 hijackers.’ The
report adds that ‘al Qaeda members
received advice and training from
Hezbollah.’22 After AMERICAN forces
temporary defeated the Taliban regime in
Afghanistan, many in the al Qaeda
network obtained refuge and assistance
in Iran.
Iran’s connection to radical
Sunnis led it to instruct its Sunni proxy
Hamas to cooperate with the Sunni al
Qaeda and bring it into the West Bank.
Although Hamas and al Qaeda differ in
certain respects, most notably their
approach to democratic participation
(Hamas embraced using the democratic
process to obtain political power and
bolster its Islamist agenda while al Qaeda
rejects any such participation) the two
started cooperating in August 2005 in
order to advance both organisations’
global agenda of defeating the West. Al
Qaeda has been present in the
Palestinian authority since at least August
2000, when Israel’s security services
uncovered a terror network linked to al
Qaeda and headed by Nabil Okal, a
Hamas operative from Gaza who received
military training in Osama bin Laden’s
camps in Pakistan and Afghanistan. After
October 2005, the relationship between
the two organisations became official and
public when the Palestinian news agency
Ma’an published a declaration in which al
Qaeda revealed the establishment of a
Gaza branch. The declaration states al
Qaeda’s main goals as implementing
Sharia (Islamic law), setting up a Sharia
state, reviving the idea of the Caliphate in
the hearts of Muslims, and working to
create a world-wide Islamic caliphate.23
Some of the major events in the
recent history of Hamas/al Qaeda
cooperation include: Hamas’ foreign
minister Mahmoud al Zahar meeting in
Pakistan in June 2006 with Jamaat-eIslami leader Qazi Hussein Ahmed, who
had close contacts with bin Laden during
the 1990s. The jihadi wing of Jamaat-eIslami and al Qaeda have collaborated as
well as have maintained financial links.
Also two days after Israel publicised the
arrest of two al Qaeda operatives in
Nablus, PA chairman Abbas told Al Hayat
(London) in March 2006 that he received
intelligence information pointing to the
presence of al Qaeda operatives in the
West Bank and Gaza. These operatives,
Azzam Abu al Ads and Bilal Hafnawy,
were indicted for enlisting recruits to carry
out terror attacks for al Qaeda and
planning a two-pronged terror attack with
a suicide bomber and a car bomb in
Jerusalem. Members of the gang who
were recruited by al Qaeda’s
infrastructure in Irbid, Jordan, were
arrested by Israeli security forces in
December 2005. 24
Thus it is faulty reasoning to
maintain that international terrorist
organisations will not cooperate with
organisations whose religions and
ideological backgrounds are at variance
with their own. The case of Jordanian
born terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi
underscores this point. Even as the head
of al Qaeda in Iraq and slaughterer of
hundreds of Iraqi Shiites, he was also a
recipient of Iranian assistance after 2001.
More importantly, Iran’s
cooperation with Sunni clients points to
the fact that it is less interested in
spreading radical Shiism per-se and more
in fomenting a global, green, radical
Islamist revolution. The threat in the
Middle East today is not, as King Hussein
asserted, the emergence of a Shiite
crescent, but the rise of a radical Islamist
force spearheaded by Iran that unites
radical Sunnis and radical Shiites and
creates a new paradigm of conflict with
the West.
Conclusions
United States defined its foreign policy
around deterring a hegemonic power and
ideology from dominating the continent of
Europe. America fought World Wars I and
II and the Cold War in accordance with
this premise. Today, Europe has been
largely stabilised and the principal global
threat stems from the present day Middle
East. Iran in many ways is now replacing
the former Soviet Union. Not only does it
seek nuclear weapons, but it carries a
radical ideology which is wishes to
export. In so doing, it seeks to become
the centre of a new radical Islamic empire
that wishes to confront the West, destroy
its ideals, and eventually replace it as the
world hegemon.
In this new Middle East, in which
the rise of a new Islamic force threatens
the West and its allies, it is really futile to
speak of a peace-process or a solution to
the Arab-Israeli conflict. The key conflict
in the Middle East today is no longer
simply the Palestinian issue and its
solution will not come from another
attempted agreement. The IsraeliPalestinian dimension of Middle Eastern
politics has been eclipsed by the growing
struggle between Islamism versus the
West. It is this conflict that will shape the
future not only of the Middle East, but
also of the Western alliance.
More specifically, the IranHamas axis will eventually bring about
more violence both to Israel and to other
Western allies in the region. The writing of
a Middle East plagued by instability and
violence, and the threat it poses to the
West, are already on the wall.
—Meyrav Wurmser
Washington, D.C.,
26th September 2007
Meyrav Wurmser is the Director of the
Centre for Middle East Policy and a
Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute,
Washington, D.C.
The new situation in the Middle East in
which the radical Muslim world, Shiite
and Sunni alike, unites under Iranian
* For endnotes, see next page.
leadership to confront the West
represents an enormous challenge for the
Western world. During the last century the
The Henry Jackson Society is named after
United States Democrat Senator, Henry M. Jackson. The
Society is a registered charity for the understanding
and articulation of democratic geopolitics—a proactive
and principled foreign policy which differentiates
between constitutionally governed countries and
autocratic regimes.
[4]
‘In matters of national
security, the best politics
is no politics.’
— Henry M. Jackson
© 2007 The Henry Jackson Society
Notes
1 Eli Rekhess, ‘The Territorial Connection: Iran, the Islamic Jihad and Hamas’, Justice, Volume 5 (May 1995), reprinted by Israel
Ministry of Foreign Affairs: http://www.israel-mfa.gov.il/MFA/MFAArchive/1990_1999/ 1995/5
Hillel Frisch, ‘Iran-Hamas Alliance: Threat and Folly’, BESA Perspective Paper, No. 28, 1st May 2007, available at: http://
www.biu.ac.il/SOC/besa/perspective28.html
2
3
Frisch, ‘Iran-Hamas Alliance: Threat and Folly’, BESA Perspective Paper.
4
Al-Hayat (London), 17th December 1992, http://wwww.meforum.org/article/251
5
Rekhess, ‘The Terrorist Connection – Iran, The Islamic Jihad and Hamas’, Justice, Vol. 5 (May 1995).
6
Frisch, ‘Iran-Hamas Alliance: Threat and Folly’, BESA Perspective Paper.
7
Amos Harel, ‘Israel Worried Hamas and Iran Developing Strategic Relations’, Haaretz, 14th December 2006.
8‘Hamas
9
coup was coordinated with Iran’, Associated Press, 24th June 2007.
Harel, ‘Israel Worried Hamas and Iran Developing Strategic Relations’, Haaretz, 14th December 2006.
10
Harel, ‘Israel Worried Hamas and Iran Developing Strategic Relations’, Haaretz.
11
Kenneth Katzman, ‘Hamas’s Foreign Benefactors’, Middle East Quarterly, June 1995.
12
Katzman, ‘Hamas’s Foreign Benefactors’, Middle East Quarterly.
Al-Mughrabi, Nidal, ‘Hamas officials say Iran to fill funding void’, Reuterts, 28th February 2006. Quoted in: The Israel Project,
‘Timeline of Hamas-Iran Ties’, available online at: www.theisraelproject.org
13
‘Iran Hails Hamas Victory’, Al Jazeera News, 28th January 2006, http://english.aljazeera.net/English/archive/archive?
Archiveld=21223. Quoted in The Israel Project, ‘Timeline of Hamas-Iran Ties’, available online at: www.theisraelproject.org
14
‘Palestinian Foreign Minister: Iran Donates $120 million to Hamas-led government’, News Agencies, 16th November 2006.
Quoted in: The Israel Project, ‘Timeline of Hamas-Iran Ties’, available online at: www.theisraelproject.org
15
16
Ha’aretz, 14th December 2006.
17
Ha’aretz, 14th December 2006.
Jonathan D. Halevi, ‘The Palestinian Government: Between Al-Qaeda Jihadism and Tactical Pragmatism’, in Iran, Hizbullah,
Hams and the Global Jihad: A New Conflict Paradigm for the West, (Jerusalem Centre for Public Affairs: Jerusalem, 2007). p.76.
18
Halevi, ‘The Palestinian Government: Between Al-Qaeda Jihadism and Tactical Pragmatism’, in Iran, Hizbullah, Hams and the
Global Jihad: A New Conflict Paradigm for the West, (Jerusalem Centre for Public Affairs: Jerusalem, 2007). p. 72.
19
Dore Gold, ‘Introduction’, in Iran, Hizbullah, Hams and the Global Jihad: A New Conflict Paradigm for the West, (Jerusalem
Centre for Public Affairs: Jerusalem, 2007). p. 8.
20
Gold, ‘Introduction’, in Iran, Hizbullah, Hams and the Global Jihad: A New Conflict Paradigm for the West, (Jerusalem Centre for
Public Affairs: Jerusalem, 2007). p. 8.
21
Gold, ‘Introduction’, in Iran, Hizbullah, Hams and the Global Jihad: A New Conflict Paradigm for the West, (Jerusalem Centre for
Public Affairs: Jerusalem, 2007). p. 9.
22
Halevi, ‘The Palestinian Government: Between Al-Qaeda Jihadism and Tactical Pragmatism’, in Iran, Hizbullah, Hams and the
Global Jihad: A New Conflict Paradigm for the West, p.76.
23
Halevi, ‘The Palestinian Government: Between Al-Qaeda Jihadism and Tactical Pragmatism’, in Iran, Hizbullah, Hams and the
Global Jihad: A New Conflict Paradigm for the West, p.72.
24
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