Israel’s role in the creation of Hamas

Brigadier General Yitzhak Segev, who served as an Israeli military governor in Gaza in the early 1980s, had disclosed in an interview to The New York Times that he had contributed to financing the Palestinian Islamist movement as a “counterweight” to Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) and the Fatah party.

He further confessed that the Israeli government had provided him with a budget. Another retired Israeli official Avner Cohen had also given a similar statement during his interview to the Wall Street Journal on January 24, 2009. He was quoted as saying, “Hamas, to my great regret, is Israel’s creation,” and further explained that “Israel cooperated with a crippled, half-blind cleric named Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, even as he was laying the foundations for what would become Hamas.”