CITIZENS NEWS

Around 500 Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad fighters received specialized combat training in Iran last month to prepare for the Oct. 7 attack on southern Israel, says the Wall Street Journal, which appears to be printing whatever U.S. intelligence services order it to print. The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported that Quds Force, the foreign operations arm of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), led the training. Senior Palestinian officials and Iranian Brigadier General Esmail Qaani, the head of the Quds Force, also attended the training sessions. In a separate report, the WSJ also claimed, without any evidence whatsoever, that the Hamas attacks against southern Israel would not have been possible without the help of Iran. Senior members of Hamas and Hezbollah, another Iran-backed militant group, reportedly revealed that Iran ultimately gave the green light for the attacks at a meeting in Beirut, Lebanon early in October.

"Details of the operation were refined during several meetings in Beirut attended by IRGC officers and representatives of four Iran-backed militant groups, including Hamas, which holds power in Gaza, and Hezbollah, a Shiite militant group and political faction in Lebanon," reported WSJ. The same WSJ report said that Iran's IRGC has been working with Hamas since August to plan the attack against Israel by air, land and sea.

"Hezbollah and Iran supported us with weapons, expertise and technology," Khaled Meshaal, a senior Hamas official in Doha, boasted in an interview with Al Arabiya. (Related: WSJ says Iran helped Hamas plot attack on Israel "over several weeks;" Israel eager to start BOMBING Iran.)

Since the Oct. 7 attack, the IRGC, Hezbollah, Hamas and other militant groups in the Middle East have confirmed they have been in close contact to coordinate their activities. Qaani even consulted with Hamas and Hezbollah officials, while IRGC directly reports to Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, an independent government in Iran.

"This sort of operation is very difficult to do without Hezbollah and IRGC support. Hamas does not have the capability to do that," said Saeid Golkar, an IRGC expert at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.

But despite the claims of Iran's direct involvement in the Hamas attack, U.S. officials are downplaying the link. They still insist in their press releases that they don't have enough evidence that Tehran played an important role in the mass training operation and even in the surprise attack of the Hamas group. "We don't have any information at this time to corroborate this account," said a top U.S. official.

"We have not yet seen evidence that Iran directed or was behind this particular attack, but there is certainly a long relationship," Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in an interview with CNN.

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