Hamas Gets Training in Iran, Israeli Official Says

[oberliner]

TEL AVIV, March 5 — The chief of Israel’s Shin Bet internal security service said today that the Islamic movement Hamas has sent dozens of men from Gaza to Iran for weapons and military training.

“We know that Hamas has started to dispatch people to Iran, tens and a promise of hundreds,” the intelligence chief, Yuval Diskin, told a small group of correspondents here in a rare on-the-record briefing. The training would last months, perhaps years, he said, adding, “I see this as the strategic danger, more than any weapons smuggled into Gaza.”

Mr. Diskin’s agency is charged in part with understanding the Palestinian world. In his view, the main Palestinian secular faction, Fatah, is continuing to fragment under weak leadership from the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, and would lose another election, if held today, to the radical Hamas movement, which rejects Israel’s right to exist. Hamas won legislative elections more than a year ago and formed a government.

“I’m not optimistic about Fatah,” Mr. Diskin said. “Fatah is disintegrated and nearly destroyed, with no strong leadership.” He had harsh words for Mr. Abbas, known as Abu Mazen. “Abu Mazen is a good negotiator but doesn’t know how to deal with internal party affairs; he has done nothing to revive Fatah, either its institutions or its military power,” Mr. Diskin said. “He wanted to become the national leader of the Palestinian people, but he forgot that he needs a strong Fatah to do it.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/05/world/middleeast/05cnd-mideast.html