THE SUNDAY TIMES: A Hamas leader admits hundreds of his fighters have travelled to Tehran
The Hamas commander was in a hurry. Hunched forward in a navy-blue parka, with the wind-chapped skin and drawn eyes of someone who had been outdoors all night, he had just returned from the front line with Israel. The whine of drones overhead signalled that his enemy was hunting for blood.
For someone who had survived the fiercest fighting between Israelis and Palestinians since 2000 and the deaths of scores of his fellow fighters, the commander, already a senior figure in his late twenties, appeared remarkably composed.
He is in the vanguard of the Izzedine al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas which is growing into a disciplined army, trained to fight for victory rather than be consigned to the “martyr’s death” of the suicide bomber.
Israel has long insisted that Iran is behind this training. Last week Yuval Diskin, the head of the Israeli internal security service Shin Bet, said as much when he claimed that Hamas had “started to dispatch people to Iran, tens and a promise of hundreds”. He provided no evidence.
The Hamas commander, however, confirmed for the first time that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard has been training its men in Tehran for more than two years and is currently honing the skills of 150 fighters.
The details he gave suggested that, if anything, Shin Bet has underestimated the extent of Iran’s influence on Hamas’s increasingly sophisticated tactics and weaponry. Hamas wages Iran’s proxy war on Israel >>> By Marie Colvin in Gaza City
Mark Alexander (Paperback)
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