Hamas was created by the Israelis.

Hamas — was created by the Israelis.

Brig. Gen. Yitzhak Segev was the Israeli military governor in Gaza in the early 1980s. 

Segev told a New York Times reporter that he had helped finance HAMAS (the Palestinian Islamist movement) as a “counterweight” to the secularists and leftists of the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Fatah party, led by Yasser Arafat (who himself referred to Hamas as “a creature of Israel.”)

How Israel Helped Create Hamas

“The Israeli government gave me a budget,” the retired brigadier general confessed, “and the military government gives to the mosques.”

“Hamas, to my great regret, is Israel’s creation,” Avner Cohen, a former Israeli religious affairs official who worked in Gaza for more than two decades, told the Wall Street Journal in 2009. 

Back in the mid-1980s, Cohen even wrote an official report to his superiors warning them not to play divide-and-rule in the Occupied Territories, by backing Palestinian Islamists against Palestinian secularists. “I … suggest focusing our efforts on finding ways to break up this monster before this reality jumps in our face,” he wrote.

They didn’t listen to him. And Hamas was the result. To be clear:  the Israelis helped build up Hamas...

How Israel Helped Create Hamas