The head of a Palestinian terrorist group told a Lebanese news outlet that Hamas has received arms and training from Syria, Iran and Hezbollah.
PFLP-GC Secretary-General Ahmad Jibril spoke to Lebanon’s Al-Manar TV on July 17 and said that the Islamist terror group controlling the Gaza Strip has received “a lot of help both in the scientific sense and in transferring weapons and equipment” from Tehran and its allies in Damascus and Lebanon.
In the interview, translated by MEMRI, Jibril described the route by which arms were smuggled from Syria to the blockaded Gaza Strip, explaining that the armed from Iran can’t be transferred by the Persian Gulf because it “is under surveillance.”
“We transferred [the missiles] from the airports in Damascus to Khartoum, from Khartoum to Port Sudan, and from there to the Sinai. From the Sinai, they were transferred via tunnels to the Gaza Strip,” the Palestinian faction leader explained. “The brothers in Hezbollah established cells of Bedouin and so on in the Sinai Desert. You could transfer the weapons to them, and they would get them into Gaza.”
Israel intercepted an arms shipment earlier this year in the Red Sea which the IDF said was destined for Hamas via Iran, Syria and Sudan. A US official and two Middle East analysts postulated that the arms shipment may have been bound for Sinai rather than the Gaza Strip.
Israeli Naval commandos intercepted 40 M-302 missiles, 181 122-mm mortars, and 400,000 7.62 caliber rounds in the arms cache on the ship while it was sailing off the coasts of Eritrea and Sudan.
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