PFLP chief says Iran, Syria, Hezbollah armed and trained Hamas

PFLP-GC Secretary-General Ahmad Jibril tells Lebanon’s Al-Manar TV that Hamas received arms and training from Syria, Iran and Hezbollah.

“After 2008, hundreds of our young people left the Gaza Strip for Syria, Lebanon, and Tehran, to train and to learn how to improve these weapons. Allah be praised, these weapons indeed were improved,” Jibril says in the interview aired on July 17 and translated by MEMRI. “The brothers in Syria, in Iran, and even in Hezbollah provided a lot of help both in the scientific sense and in transferring weapons and equipment.”

Jibril describes the route by which arms were smuggled from Syria to the blockaded Gaza Strip, explaining that the arms from Iran can’t be transferred by the Persian Gulf because it “is under surveillance.”

“We transferred [the missiles] from the airports in Damascus to Khartoum, from Khartoum to Port Sudan, and from there to the Sinai. From the Sinai, they were transferred via tunnels to the Gaza Strip,” the Palestinian faction leader explains. “The brothers in Hezbollah established cells of Bedouin and so on in the Sinai Desert. You could transfer the weapons to them, and they would get them into Gaza.”

http://youtu.be/9wWODdCgwOk