Iran supports Hamas violence, says Israel

Telegraph.co.uk

Israeli officials believe Iranian support for Hamas is behind the increasing number of terrorist attacks - including Thursday's deadly shooting in Jerusalem.

Their warnings that Hamas' use of stronger rockets and larger-scale incursions into Israel represent the escalation of a proxy war were echoed on Friday by Jordan's King Abdullah.

advertisement"Those in the Iranian government that are pursuing this policy have hijacked the Palestinian corps," he said in Washington.

"The failure of the peace process will get them to increase their ambitions in the region."

Across Israel this weekend, eerily familiar sounds cut through the warm springtime air: sirens, restaurants turning their televisions from music programming to news and teenagers calling home on mobile phones to reassure anxious parents.

But both Palestinians and Israelis say it is too early to call last week's violence the beginning of a third Palestinian intifada, or uprising.

Whether it amounts to a short-lived flare-up or a longer campaign, the violence can be attributed at least in part to the funding and inspiration supplied by Iran to Hamas and what Israelis see as its Shiite counterpart in Lebanon, the Islamist movement Hizbollah.

"What Hizbollah has been doing for a long time is to try to recruit people in the West Bank to pay them, to hire them and to direct them to carry out terrorist attacks," said Ephraim Sneh, a member of Knesset and former Israeli deputy defence minister.

He said that this week's shooting attack on a religious school in Jerusalem appeared to be a continuation of this policy.

There is some confusion over who was behind the attack after Hamas made contradictory statements over whether it was involved. A previously unknown group, the Martyrs of Imad Mughniyeh, named after an assassinated Lebanese Hizbollah commander, also claimed responsibility.

Either way, it was the second suicide mission to hit a highly symbolic Israeli target in the last month.

The Jerusalem religious college targeted on Thursday is the ideological heart of Israel's religious-Zionist movement, which has championed settlement expansion in the occupied West Bank.

On February 4, the country's first suicide bombing in more than a year was aimed at Dimona, home to a major nuclear power plant.

That bombing, which killed an elderly woman, claimed by Hamas, was carried out by two young men from Hebron, one of whom was shot dead before he could detonate himself.

But there have been other, smaller events, many of which have gone largely unnoticed. In late January, two attackers tried to shoot up a small religious school in the West Bank, injuring two students before being shot themselves.

On Thursday, Hamas also adopted a method of ambush borrowed from Hizbollah's tactics in southern Lebanon, blowing up an Israeli military jeep on patrol, killing one soldier and injuring three others, before ambushing rescue teams with mortars and gunfire.

And last week's scenes of rioting, rock-throwing and Molotov cocktails in east Jerusalem and across the West Bank evoked images from the start of the last intifada, in 2000, after peace talks fell apart.

That uprising came to an informal, uneasy end with a truce in February 2005, by when more than 1,000 Israelis and 3,000 Palestinians were killed.

The latest violence can be linked directly to Israel's operation last weekend in Gaza, where around 120 Palestinians including 22 children were killed in a 48-hour offensive aimed at slowing deadly rocket fire on Israeli cities.

Footage of the injured and dead, broadcast on Arabic-language satellite networks, infuriated Palestinians and much of the Arab world.

But it also testifies to the weariness of a Palestinian population which has seen little tangible progress from negotiations.

The economy in Gaza has collapsed and even the more peaceful West Bank is in recession.

The number of checkpoints in the West Bank has only increased since the Annapolis, Maryland peace summit in November 2007. Many are beginning to lose hope.

Muhib Salameh, a Palestinian legislator from the Fatah movement of the Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas, said: "If the people see no political horizon, not only will they resort to popular resistance or even militarised confrontations and attacks, but they will become tools of extremist groups like Hizbollah and even Al-Qaeda."

Meanwhile, militants in Gaza are still firing rockets, including the more powerful, prefabricated grad rockets, with a longer range and greater payload. It is widely believed Hamas obtained many more of these rockets, with financial aid from Iran, when the border between Gaza and Egypt was blown open for nearly a week in January.

"We have no doubt that Hizbollah is a role model for Hamas," said Mark Regev, the spokesman for Israel's prime minister Ehud Olmert.

"And just as Hizbollah controlled parts of Lebanon and through that managed to build a formidable military machine, so that is the model for Hamas in Gaza."

Mr Abbas is equally worried not only about Iranian involvement, but by what he believes to be an al-Qaeda presence in Gaza, which has been fully controlled by Hamas since June.

"Iran has a certain influence [in Gaza], nobody ignores this, in financing and other types of assistance," said Nimr Hamad, a senior advisor to Mr Abbas.