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<\/p>\nTwo days on from the most barbaric and deliberate attack on Jews since the Holocaust, there is a growing understanding that while Hamas terrorists were responsible for the actual acts of butchery, Iran is the power behind the group.<\/p>\n
Iran funds Hamas, supplies it and directs it. Hamas does not act without Iran’s involvement, and an operation as widescale as that seen on Saturday can only have been planned with Iran’s active support \u2013 and more likely at Iran’s instruction.<\/p>\n
Iran is the world’s leading funder of terror. Much of this happens through direct funding, as with Hamas. But the regime also operates through its armed forces, in particular its renowned Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).<\/p>\n
The US State Department describes the IRGC’s role as being ‘to provide support to terrorist organisations, provide cover for associated covert operations, and create instability’. Yet it is, as we shall see, the weakness and ineptitude of the US under President Joe Biden that has emboldened Iran and Hamas to wreak such devastating destruction.<\/p>\n
And make no mistake, the appalling events in Israel affect all of us.<\/p>\n
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Two days on from the most barbaric and deliberate attack on Jews since the Holocaust, there is a growing understanding that while Hamas terrorists were responsible for the actual acts of butchery, Iran is the power behind the group. Pictured:\u00a0A rocket is launched from the coastal Gaza strip towards Israel on Saturday<\/p>\n
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A view of a junction shows the aftermath of a mass-infiltration by Hamas gunmen from the Gaza Strip, in the Sderot area of southern Israel, on Saturday<\/p>\n
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The US State Department describes the IRGC’s role as being ‘to provide support to terrorist organisations, provide cover for associated covert operations, and create instability’. Yet it is, as we shall see, the weakness and ineptitude of the US under President Joe Biden (pictured with Secretary of State Anthony Blinken last week) that has emboldened Iran and Hamas to wreak such devastating destruction<\/p>\n
You might think that the Middle East is in distant lands \u2013 that, however horrifying things are over there, they do not impinge on us in the UK.<\/p>\n
You would be gravely mistaken. Iran’s malign influence is certainly growing in the Middle East. But, increasingly, it is also being felt here in Britain.<\/p>\n
In February, security minister Tom Tugendhat told the House of Commons that ‘between 2020 and 2022, Iran tried to collect intelligence on UK-based Israeli and Jewish individuals. We believe this was a preparation for future lethal operations’.<\/p>\n
That followed his revelation of what he called ‘very real and specific threats towards UK-based journalists working for Iran International’ \u2013 a prominent and independent Persian-language news channel.<\/p>\n
Earlier, the MI5 director-general had said there had been ten Iranian plots to kidnap or murder British residents in 2022. It is difficult to put a precise figure on the amounts Iran spends supporting Hamas but we do know that back in 1992, when the terror group began suicide bombings in Israel, Iran was sending it around $50million (\u00a341million) a year.<\/p>\n
By 2020, the US State Department was reporting that Iran’s funding had doubled to more than $100million (\u00a381million) a year.<\/p>\n
Hamas’s leader, Ismail Haniyeh, is reported to have said recently the Iranians gave it an extra $70million (\u00a357million) to develop missile and defence systems in the Gaza Strip \u2013 weapons which were likely used this weekend.<\/p>\n
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A missile explodes in Gaza City during an Israeli air strike on Sunday\u00a0as the conflict’s death toll surged close to 1,000 after the Palestinian militant group launched a massive surprise assault<\/p>\n
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A woman stands in a damaged room in Ashkelon, Israel after rockets were launched from the Gaza Strip by Hamas militants<\/p>\n
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In the deadliest day of violence in Israel in 50 years, the middle eastern country’s warplanes strafed densely populated Gaza City with bombs in retaliatory strikes<\/p>\n
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Rockets struck buildings across southern Israel – and militants are reported to have taken to the streets after ‘infiltrating’ the country<\/p>\n
Hamas’s founding charter is clear about its aim. It is not \u2013 despite the repeated assertions of so many in gullible broadcasters such as the BBC \u2013 the creation of a Palestinian state. It’s not even just the elimination of Israel.<\/p>\n
The Hamas charter states openly that its aim is the elimination of Jews. The charter quotes the Islamic hadith [‘saying’] in which Mohammed prophesies the annihilation of the Jews: ‘The Day of Judgement will not come until the Muslims fight the Jews, when the Jews will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say, ‘O Muslim, O servant of God, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.’<\/p>\n
So when Hamas butchers Jews as it did on Saturday for no reason other than that they are Jews, no one should be surprised. Hamas is officially classified as a terrorist organisation by the UK, the US and the EU.<\/p>\n
Not that that is enough for the BBC, which refuses to ascribe any blame to Hamas-inspired mass murder, and insists the group’s terrorists are simply ‘militants’.<\/p>\n
Indeed, yesterday morning a BBC News presenter spoke of ‘the scale and ferocity of attacks on both sides’ \u2013 as if the victims of terror are as guilty as the terrorists.<\/p>\n
What lies behind this is the inherent anti-Israel bias of the BBC, rooted perhaps in the pernicious idea that one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.<\/p>\n
It ends up with the BBC labelling those monsters who parade the bullet-ridden bodies of Israeli civilians through the streets of Gaza as ‘gunmen’, as if they are simply engaged in a fight.<\/p>\n
And while seemingly unable to call a terrorist a terrorist, the BBC also gives apologists for terror a platform to justify the atrocities.<\/p>\n
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Smoke billows from a building in Gaza after Israel fired missiles in response to Palestinian air strikes on Saturday\u00a0<\/p>\n
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An injured man is carried on a stretcher by members of the Israeli security forces following air strikes in southern Israel<\/p>\n
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People flee as clashes flare between Palestinian groups and Israeli forces in Gaza City following the earlier air strikes on Saturday<\/p>\n
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Palestinians celebrate on Saturday after an Israeli tank was hit by Hamas gunmen who infiltrated the south of the country, on the Israeli side of the Israel-Gaza border<\/p>\n
Yesterday’s The World This Weekend on Radio 4 led with an interviewee who was talking about the ‘dream’ of seeing the Israelis attacked.<\/p>\n
Given Iran’s critical role in these attacks, you would think that Western governments would do all they could to isolate the regime and starve it of the money it needs to fund terror. Yet quite the opposite is happening.<\/p>\n
In 2015, the so-called Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action \u2013 more widely known as the Iran Deal \u2013 was signed by Iran with the five permanent members of the UN Security Council (China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States) and Germany.<\/p>\n
It offered Iran relief from sanctions the West had imposed on the country if it agreed to inspections of its nuclear programme, to prevent it developing a nuclear weapon. All well and good \u2013 except Iran had no intention of halting its nuclear weapons plan and simply hid it from inspectors.<\/p>\n
The naivety was almost incomprehensible. Iran’s Middle East neighbours, led by the Saudis, were incandescent over the deal which gave Iran much-needed cash and the space to pursue nuclear weapons development. Donald Trump rightly ripped it up in 2018. Under Mr Trump’s new ‘maximum pressure’ sanctions strategy, Iran started to be brought to its knees economically.<\/p>\n
But Mr Biden’s arrival in the White House ended that by bringing back to office many of those behind the original misguided deal. They have spent the past three years unsuccessfully trying to agree a new deal.<\/p>\n
This has not stopped Mr Biden appeasing Iran, first by lifting most oil sanctions \u2013 allowing the country to sell millions of barrels a day \u2013 and then in August handing over $6billion (\u00a34billion) to the regime as part of a deal to free five Americans who were being held in Tehran.<\/p>\n
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The\u00a0Israeli army moves artillery units toward border with Gaza on Sunday<\/p>\n
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A man is seen walking with his bicycle on Sunday after Israeli airstrikes destroyed buildings and neighbourhoods at Rimal district of Gaza City<\/p>\n
Pathetically, in its appalling naivety, the US insists this money can only be used for humanitarian aid.<\/p>\n
The result is that Iran is once again flush with cash and getting more so \u2013 cash which is used to fund the likes of Hamas and the Revolutionary Guards.<\/p>\n
The world has seen this weekend how Hamas operates.<\/p>\n
Iran will be filled with glee. And as the West continues to pretend Iran can be treated as a normal state, that glee will only grow.<\/p>\n