As the world continues to bemoan the suffering, poverty and hardship of Gaza citizens, it turns out that their elected rulers in Hamas has been spending $100 million of their partially donor-funded annual budget of $530 million on advanced weapons, digging tunnels, training, and salaries for Hamas fighters. Of this amount, $40 million of the annual total goes to the terror group’s tunnel digging work.
Hamas has been investing in weapons that could bypass the Iron Dome anti-missile system and in more precise rockets than those it possessed in the summer of 2014, when it fought a 50-day war with Israel.
Hamas, a terrorist group who is committed to destroying Israel, has allocated tremendous resources to smuggling materials into the Strip that can be used for building weapons from Israel, by sea or through smuggling tunnels from the Sinai Peninsula.
In the smuggling efforts from Sinai to Gaza, Hamas military leaders in the southern Strip work together with Abd al-Rahman Barhame, a senior coordinator from the Sinai affiliate of the Islamic State who is in Gaza as a guest of Hamas’s military wing.
Other Islamic State officials responsible for coordination with Hamas also reside in the coastal enclave, preserving the ties between the two terror groups despite Egypt’s objections, largely without informing the Hamas political leadership of these activities.