What is Iran’s relationship with Hamas?
Hamas has had ties to Iran for decades, according to the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. In the early 1990s, the Iranian regime hosted conferences as a “counterweight to the ongoing Arab-Israeli peace process” where Hamas delegates “began developing high-level contacts in Iran.”
In 1992, Israel began deporting Hamas leaders to Lebanon. Iran and Hezbollah, a Tehran-backed Islamist militant group and Lebanese political party, hosted Hamas members and taught them how to build suicide bombs and use other militant tactics. According to the Washington Institute for Near Policy’s analysis, Iran began “sending the group up to $50 million annually.”
In recent years, Iran has provided military hardware to the militant group, particularly missiles, according to Wilson Center research. Iranian officials also disclosed that some Hamas operatives went to Tehran for training and that Iran has shared missile program technology with Hamas.
Current and former U.S. officials say the unprecedented scale and sophistication of Hamas’ recent attack on Israel indicate that Iran most likely played a significant role. The Iranian regime has publicly praised Hamas for the surprise attack on Saturday, including staging street celebrations.
In a briefing on Monday, a spokesperson for Iran’s Foreign Ministry said that Iran had played no role in the attack, calling such allegations “politicized.”
When was the last conflict between Hamas and Israel?
Israel and Hamas waged an 11-day war in 2021 that killed 248 Palestinians and 12 Israelis. The conflict began when dozens of Palestinian families faced possible evictions from their homes in east Jerusalem’s historic neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah as part of a long legal battle with Jewish settlers. Clashes between Israeli police, Palestinian worshippers and nationalist Israelis led to days of violence in and around Al-Aqsa Mosque.
Hamas then launched more than 2,000 rockets primarily targeting Ashkelon and Tel Aviv, many were brought down by Israel’s Iron Dome anti-missile system. For Israelis, the rocket barrage, which killed a dozen people, marked the most violent escalation on their soil since 2014.
The U.N. said that Israeli forces may have committed war crimes during the conflict and that Hamas’ indiscriminate rocket fire was also a clear violation of the rules of war. Some Palestinians praised Hamas for defending them and a poll taken at the time found that 53% of Palestinians viewedHamas as most capable of representing the Palestinian people. Only 14% chose Fatah.
How has Hamas changed in its 30-year history?
For decades, Hamas called for the destruction of Israel. In 2017, thirty years after its founding, the group issued a new charter that stopped short of calling for the destruction of Israel. The document, known as the Hamas 2017 charter, marked the first time the group showed a willingness to accept a Palestinian state that would fall within the borders that existed in 1967, consisting of the West Bank, Gaza and all of Jerusalem.
The charter describes the Palestinians as “a people who have been let down by a world that fails to secure their rights and restore to them what has been usurped from them, a people whose land continues to suffer one of the worst types of occupation in this world.”
The move was seen as an attempt by Hamas to improve its relations with the Egyptian government by breaking away from the Muslim Brotherhood, which had been outlawed in Egypt. Hamas, however, stuck to its hardline refusal to acknowledge Israel’s existence, referring to it as a “Zionist entity,” or consider any previous Israeli-Palestinian peace deals, such as the Oslo Accords. The charter was rejected by both Israel and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.