I'll just leave this here... https://wikispooks.com/wiki/Hamas#Origins Origins Hamas is largely a creation of the Israeli deep state. For years, Israel encouraged Gaza’s Islamists as a counterweight to the secular nationalists of the Palestine Liberation Organization and its dominant faction, Yasser Arafat’s Fatah, helping to turn a bunch of fringe Palestinian Islamists in the late 1970s into one of the world’s most notorious militant groups, which has killed far more Israeli civilians than any secular Palestinian militant group. Brig. Gen. Yitzhak Segev, who was the Israeli military governor in Gaza in the early 1980s, later told the New York Times Jerusalem bureau chief David K. Shipler that he was giving money to the Muslim Brotherhood, the precursor of Hamas, on the instruction of the Israeli authorities. The funding was intended to tilt power away from both Communist and Palestinian nationalist movements in Gaza, and especially from Arafat (who himself referred to Hamas as "a creature of Israel"), which Israel considered more threatening than the fundamentalists. "The Israeli government gave me a budget" the retired brigadier general said, "and the military government gives to the mosques".[2][3] Avner Cohen, a former Israeli religious affairs official who worked in Gaza for more than two decades, told the Wall Street Journal in 2009 that "Hamas, to my great regret, is Israel’s creation," Back in the mid-1980s, Cohen wrote an official report to his superiors warning them not to play divide-and-rule in the Occupied Territories, by backing Palestinian Islamists against Palestinian secularists. "I … suggest focusing our efforts on finding ways to break up this monster before this reality jumps in our face," he wrote.[4] The group might have received covert support from the Israeli deep state to conduct a number of suicide bombings in the 1990s, to bury any attempts at a Palestinian-Israeli peace process. [Citation Needed]