Israel hit Hamas targets in Gaza on Sunday, including some of the terrorist group’s security caravans in the central Gaza village of al-Mughraqa (see map below):

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According to Haaretz, the caravans served as Hamas’ security headquarters.


The IDF says that the attack on Hamas was a response to “the barrage of Qassam rockets and mortar shells fired at Israel today, which wounded an Israeli civilian and two IDF soldiers.”

Also hit were Hamas smuggling tunnels coming from Egypt into Gaza. Last year, Hamas reportedly took in $20 million U.S. dollars per month from Gaza tunnel smuggling operations.

A Japanese reporter and his cameraman shot this video of a Gaza smuggling tunnel operation between Rafah and Egypt:

Khaled Meshal, the Hamas terror chief whom Syria has a given safe haven for years, boasted that Hamas would have “a second, third, and fourth Gilad Shalit” if the Israeli Defense Forces sent ground forces into Gaza.

According to al Jazeera Meshal met with other terror supporters and figureheads in Damascus yesterday, including Saeed Jalili, Iran’s Supreme National Security Council Secretary-General and Ramadan Abdullah Shalah, head of the Islamic Jihad terrorist group.

As this blogger has repeatedly stressed, Iran continues to train, arm, and fund Hamas terror operations. “Iran is our mother,” a senior Hamas guerilla commander told The Sunday Times in March 2008, bragging that “300 of the group’s ‘best brains’ had been secretly sent to Tehran.”

Today’s conviction of a tax-exempt Muslim non-profit group created in part, according to prosecutors, to raise money to support HAMAS after it became a U.S.-designated terrorist group, and the conviction of five (5) of the group’s leaders is a big win for U.S. prosecutors.

Read the indictment below:


The Holy Land Foundation’s terror indictment for funding HAMAS’ maintained that:

• “[T]he HLF provided significant financial resources to HAMAS leaders and key strategists”
• [T]he HLF sent approximately $100,000 to HAMAS’ future Political Bureau Chief Mousa Abu Marzook and his associates.
• “[F]rom 1988 through 1989, the HLF wire transferred approximately $670,000 to an account held by the Islamic Center of Gaza…established by Hamas spiritual leader and founder Shek Ahmed Yassin, and was used by him to conduct and coordinate HAMAS activities”
• The HLF funded children and families of HAMAS suicide bombers and relatives jailed on terror-related charges to help “HAMAS’ efforts to win the hearts and minds of” Palestinians.”

According to the Dallas Morning News, a number of HLF defendants have family who are Hamas leaders:

• Defendant Mufid Abdulqader is the brother of Hamas’ leader Khalid Meshal a/k/a Khaled Meshaal
• Defendant Mohammad el-Mezain, an HLF co-founder, is a cousin of Mousa Abu Marzook, Mishal’s deputy, and married the cousin of Ghassan Eslashi, former HLF board chairman reportedly living in Syria with other Hamas figureheads

Hisham al-Labadani, secretary to Hamas terrorist figurehead Khaled Meshal, was reported by a Syrian opposition group to have been assassinated after being dragged from his car in Syria’s city of Homs.


The Reform Party of Syria (RPS) reported today that al-Labadani “was dragged from his car and shot dead in daylight in the city of Homs.”

According to the RPS,

Operatives close to the event told RPS that al-Labadani’s murder is a signal some in the Assad regime were sending to Hamas [for its] continued cooperation with the IRGC of Iran. The group, led by Mohammad Nassif Kheir Bek, has been promoting rapprochement with the west against the entrenched supporters of the Iranian influence in Syria who have gained key positions lately.

Homs is less than 50 km from Lebanon’s mountainous Northeastern border with Syria (Inset):

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Iran’s long history of military, financial, and terror support for Hamas is well documented.

On March 9, 2008, the The Sunday Times reported that a senior Hamas commander boasted that 300 of the organization’s “best brains” were secretly sent to Iran for military training from Iran’s Revolutionary Guard:

“Iran is our mother,” the commander said. “She gives us information, military supplies and financial support.”

The Sunday Times report said that since 2005, at least seven (7) separate groups of Hamas fighters trained with Iranian instructors so that they could be snipers, make explosives out of everyday items, and make deadlier rockets to use in terrorist attacks against Israel.

Israel has long known about Iran’s role in equipping, financing, and training Hamas terrorists to carry out attacks against Israel. The New York Times reported last August that:

Hamas has sent hundreds of its fighters abroad for military training, most of them to Iran, the Israeli Army’s deputy chief of staff says, and Israel has the names of more than 100 of them