"Details of the operation were refined during several meetings in Beirut attended by IRGC officers and representatives of four Iran-backed militant groups, including Hamas, which holds power in Gaza, and Hezbollah, a Shiite militant group and political faction in Lebanon," reported WSJ. The same WSJ report said that Iran's IRGC has been working with Hamas since August to plan the attack against Israel by air, land and sea.
"Hezbollah and Iran supported us with weapons, expertise and technology," Khaled Meshaal, a senior Hamas official in Doha, boasted in an interview with Al Arabiya. (Related: WSJ says Iran helped Hamas plot attack on Israel "over several weeks;" Israel eager to start BOMBING Iran.)
"This sort of operation is very difficult to do without Hezbollah and IRGC support. Hamas does not have the capability to do that," said Saeid Golkar, an IRGC expert at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.
But despite the claims of Iran's direct involvement in the Hamas attack, U.S. officials are downplaying the link. They still insist in their press releases that they don't have enough evidence that Tehran played an important role in the mass training operation and even in the surprise attack of the Hamas group. "We don't have any information at this time to corroborate this account," said a top U.S. official.
"We have not yet seen evidence that Iran directed or was behind this particular attack, but there is certainly a long relationship," Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in an interview with CNN.Follow WWIII.news to read more stories related to the conflict between Israel and Palestine.
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Sources include: WSJ.com ZeroHedge.com MSN.comIsraeli forces face not only Hamas but other Palestinian factions
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