Dilated said
Israel tolerated the precursor to hamas - at the time a non violent provider of much needed social services tp Palestinian Arabs - as a counterpoint to PLO which was hijacking planes and sh1t... no evidence that israel provided funding or weapons etc to hamas. Hindsight a bi#ch tho, no one forsaw how radicalized hamas would become. What's fact tho is that neither side has the Palestinian peoples best interest at heart.
According to Robert Dreyfuss, author of "Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam":
"And beginning in 1967 through the late 1980s, Israel helped the Muslim Brotherhood establish itself in the occupied territories. It assisted Ahmed Yassin, the leader of the Brotherhood, in creating Hamas, betting that its Islamist character would weaken the PLO."
According to Charles Freeman, former US ambassador to Saudi Arabia,
"Israel started Hamas. It was a project of Shin Bet [Israeli domestic intelligence agency], which had a feeling that they could use it to hem in the PLO."
New York Times Reporter David Shipler cites the Israeli military governor of Gaza as boasting that Israel expressly financed the fundamentalists against the PLO:
"
Politically speaking, Islamic fundamentalists were sometimes regarded as useful to Israel, because they had conflicts with the secular supporters of the PLO. Violence between the two groups erupted occasionally on West Bank university campuses. Israeli military governor of the Gaza Strip, Brigadier General Yitzhak Segev, once told me how he had financed the Islamic movement as a counterweight to the PLO and the Communists. 'The Israeli Government gave me a budget and the military government gives to the mosques,' he said."
(It was a divide and conquer tactic that backfired)