(Bloomberg) -- Besieged and degraded after more than a year of war, pockets of Hamas fighters in northern Gaza have been dogging the Israeli army with what are often makeshift munitions. That’s precisely what their sponsors in Tehran intended.
Fourteen pages of notes, interspersed with sketches of drone avionics and rocket nose-cones, provide a glimpse of what intelligence officers say has been secret training within Iran for Hamas members tasked with creating a homegrown arsenal.
As troops and tanks have churned through Gaza, cutting off weapons supply lines and penning in areas where insurgency still simmers, knowledge of how to improvise is especially valuable to the surviving Hamas fighters. It also makes it that much more difficult for the Israeli military to achieve one of its primary war aims — removing Hamas from the Palestinian enclave.
“The weapons factories the Israelis have been destroying were based on Iranian know-how, but these are increasingly being destroyed,” said Matthew Levitt, a counter-terrorism expert with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “The remaining Hamas fighters will use whatever weapons they can come by.”
Iran and the Palestinian Islamist group have for years spoken openly about an alliance that encompassed funding and weapons smuggling. They’ve been more circumspect about other aspects of the relationship, which intelligence officers believe also included bringing Hamas members to Iran to be trained in arms manufacturing.
Israel saw the results of Iran’s assistance to Hamas in October last year, when thousands of Palestinian fighters, backed by rocket barrages, surged into its southern towns and army bases, killing about 1,200 people and abducting 250 others. Weaponry based on Iranian designs, from mines to short-range rockets and drones, was widely used during the incursion and the ensuing fighting, Israeli officials have said.
The classroom notes, said to have been written by one of the trainees from Gaza, were shown to Bloomberg News by the intelligence officers, who did not disclose the details of when and how they were obtained.
An Israeli official with knowledge of intelligence affairs, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter, could not comment on the provenance but said the weapons described corresponded with those wielded by Hamas and the allied militant group Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Both are designated as terrorist groups by the US.
Hamas, Iran’s foreign ministry and its representatives at the United Nations didn’t respond to requests for comment.
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The notes in Arabic include tips for crafting molds to make the “Talash” drone and operational instructions for the larger “Kian” drone, both designed in Iran. They also cover where to position explosives in short-range rockets, the best resins to use to make the projectiles and how to conceal landmines in fake rocks.
The courses, each lasting three to five months, had been run by a branch of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps since at least 2016, the intelligence officers said. A few dozen operatives from Hamas and PIJ were selected for each course based on their knowledge of physics, chemistry and engineering, and then brought to a training compound in Iran via circuitous routes, they said.
The program, which prioritized practice over theory, appears to have been suspended since the war began, at least in part because of the difficulties of getting out of Gaza, the officers said.
A former CIA officer who requested anonymity said that such training was also offered in Iran to Yemen’s Houthis, Iraqi Shiite militia and Syrian fighters.
Iran has been transferring weapons manufacturing know-how to Palestinian militants for decades, the Israeli official said. In 2003, Israel said its navy seized a fishing boat carrying a Hezbollah bomb expert and instructional DVDs, which were ultimately destined for Gaza. Hezbollah, based in Lebanon, is also backed by Iran.
In a 2021 speech following a round of fighting, Hamas chief Yahya Sinwar thanked Iran because it “did not hold back on us with money, weapons, and expertise.” Sinwar was killed in Gaza in October.
More than 43,000 people have died in Gaza since the war began, according to the Hamas-run health ministry, which doesn’t differentiate between civilians and fighters in its figures. Israel has lost about 400 soldiers.
--With assistance from Fadwa Hodali and Jamie Tarabay.
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