Iran is expanding its influence among the ranks of the Arab terrorist organizations targeting Israel.


General Security Services (Shabak) Director Yuval Diskin told a group of foreign journalists on Monday that dozens of Hamas terrorists have arrived in Iran for advanced weapons and tactics training. He told the reporters that hundreds more Hamas terrorists are expected to follow the first contingent.


The Iranian involvement in Hamas training is a development that Diskin characterized as a greater strategic danger to Israel than the thousands of weapons smuggled into the Gaza Strip across the Egyptian border. Diskin warned that Israel “will have to do something about it” if the process of Iranian involvement continues.

Dozens of Hamas terrorists have arrived in Iran for advanced weapons and tactics training.



Iran pledged US$50 million to the Hamas-led Palestinian Authority government shortly after it was elected in 2006, when it became clear that the Western assistance to the PA was to be cut off. Also in 2006, Israel publicly charged that Iran had already been supporting Hamas with tens of millions of US dollars annually for the Hamas offices in Damascus.


The Islamic Republic currently supports the Shiite Hizbullah in Lebanon, which relatively successfully fought a direct war with Israel in the summer of 2006. Iran provides the organization with weapons, money and training. Despite the periodic bloody clashes elsewhere in the Middle East between Sunni and Shiite Muslims, the Hizbullah itself funnels Iranian support to the Sunni Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) in the Palestinian Authority. The PIJ has been sending its own men to Lebanon and Iran for training for some time, as well.


The PIJ claimed responsibility for two Kassam rockets that were launched from northern Gaza Tuesday morning. Four people were lightly injured in the attack. One rocket landed near the port city of Ashkelon and the other on farmland outside Kibbutz Zikkim, in the western Negev. The wounded were brought to Barzilai Hospital in Ashkeon.


Later in the day, the PIJ boasted that it possesses longer-range rockets, which can reach farther north than Ashkelon. Abu Ahmed, spokesman for the Al-Quds Brigades of the PIJ, told the Israeli news service Ynet that the terrorists “will continue to respond to all the enemy’s crimes, even if it [the response] happens in the West Bank.”
In addition to the PIJ, the Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center at the Center for Special Studies noted in 2004 that Fatah terrorists in the PA also received hundreds of thousands of shekels from Iran and Hizbullah.
 
Beyond its support for Islamist terrorist groups focused on Israel, Iran also uses the Shiite insurgents in Iraq as proxy agents to fight the United States.  The Iranians have also generously contributed to Islamic movements and insurgencies in the Balkans, in the Persian Gulf's Arab kingdoms, in Turkey and in Africa.