Senior Hamas Leaders Who Direct Terrorism in Gaza Without Living in It

Iran, Qatar, Lebanon and Turkey are all home to senior leaders of the Hamas terrorist organization. While keeping their distance from the ongoing war, they manage budgets, direct terrorist activities and incite violence among the international public. While Hamas is forcefully preventing Gazans from evacuating to southern Gaza for their safety, these leaders are not even present in Gaza. Yet they remain very much involved in the terrorist organization and enable its activities.

Hamas leaders live comfortable lives abroad. They collect funds, direct terrorist activities, and build connections with international figures and organizations, and they do it all to serve one atrocious goal: terrorism. 

Hamas’ leadership has a number of official establishments that all senior operatives are members of. This includes representatives from Hamas’ three main arenas of operation: Gaza, Judea and Samaria, and the diaspora, who are all joined by the Hamas leaders in Israeli prisons.

Gaza, Judea and Samaria and Israel’s prisons are clear and defined arenas. But in order to understand, map and locate Hamas’ terrorist leaders who are active in the diaspora and what their positions truly mean, our Intelligence Directorate operates restlessly. 

The leaders of Hamas’ foreign leadership are those who do not reside in Gaza or Israel. Their job is to make contacts and create connections for Hamas in the different countries they reside in, directing terrorist activities, managing Hamas’ properties and assets and raising funds to further build and strengthen Hamas’ brutal military wing.

Hamas’ foreign leadership is dangerous; its members have immense influence within Hamas. They assist the general Shura Council - Hamas’ decision-making body, and thus have a direct impact when it comes to critical issues. They take a significant part in approving Hamas’ strategic and internal policies, its budget, and personnel appointments.

With the help of many external accomplices and generous financial backing, Hamas’ foreign leadership provides the terrorist organization with a logistical platform, creates legitimacy for its terrorist activities and develops a harmful web of international contacts. As part of these efforts, the council conducts psychological battles on traditional and social media platforms, creating a theoretical foundation for the execution of brutal terrorist attacks.

In order to understand how this all started and what countries Hamas’ foreign leadership operates from, we will have to go back a few years, to 2010. A terrorist operative named Saleh al-Arouri was released from Israeli prison and expelled to Syria. There, he became involved in Hamas leadership and began establishing Hamas’ Judea and Samaria headquarters, which he currently leads.

The headquarters he established set the manner in which Hamas operated in Judea and Samaria while providing professional direction, transferring funds to Judea and Samaria and encouraging terrorist activities, which for the first time were being planned and directed by a ‘foreign’ source.

A year later, after the beginning of the civil war in Syria, al-Arouri and the rest of the leadership escaped Syria. The members of the foreign leadership scattered throughout Turkey and Qatar, from which they continued their terrorist activities.

Today, the seniors in the foreign leadership include its head, Khaled Mashal, his deputy, Mousa Abu Marzook, and other senior figures that reside outside of Gaza, such as the Head of Hamas, Ismail Haniyeh, Yahya Sinwar’s deputy, Khalil al-Hayya, and the previously mentioned Saleh al-Arouri, who to this day operates as the head of the Judea and Samaria Hamas headquarters and operates from Lebanon.

The information our intelligence directorate holds indicates that by using its foreign leadership, Hamas is carrying out terrorist activities in Muslim countries and Muslim communities in the West in four different arenas - Lebanon, Turkey, Qatar and Iran. 

No less than four of the members of Hamas’ Political Bureau in Gaza reside in these countries, far from the ongoing war, and pull the strings of the Hamas terrorist organization.