Hamas uses weapons training in Iran, lesson notes show

(Bloomberg) — Besieged and degraded after more than a year of war, groups of Hamas fighters in northern Gaza are pursuing the Israeli army with often improvised ammunition. That is exactly what their sponsors in Tehran meant.

Most read from Bloomberg

Fourteen pages of notes, interspersed with sketches of drone electronics and missile nose cones, offer a glimpse into what intelligence officers say has been secret training inside Iran for Hamas members tasked with creating a homegrown arsenal.

As troops and tanks rage through Gaza, cutting off weapons supply lines and hiding in areas where the insurgency still simmers, knowledge of how to improvise is especially valuable for surviving Hamas fighters. It also makes it much more difficult for the Israeli military to achieve one of its main war goals: removing Hamas from the Palestinian enclave.

“The weapons factories that the Israelis destroyed were based on Iranian knowledge, but they are being destroyed more and more,” said Matthew Levitt, a counterterrorism expert at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “The remaining Hamas fighters will use whatever weapons they can find.”

Iran and the Palestinian Islamist group have openly discussed an alliance that includes financing and arms smuggling for years. They have been more cautious about other aspects of the relationship, which intelligence officials believe has included bringing Hamas members to Iran to be trained in weapons production.

Israel saw the results of Iranian aid to Hamas last October, when thousands of Palestinian fighters, backed by rocket attacks, stormed southern cities and army bases, killing around 1,200 people and kidnapping 250 others. Weapons based on Iranian designs, from mines to short-range missiles and drones, were widely used during the raid and subsequent fighting, Israeli officials say.

The classroom notes, allegedly written by one of the Gaza interns, were shown to Bloomberg News by the intelligence officers, who did not disclose details of when or how they were obtained.

An Israeli official with knowledge of intelligence matters, who spoke on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the matter, could not comment on the provenance but said the weapons described matched those of Hamas and the allied militant group Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Both have been designated as terrorist groups by the US.

Story continues