Broadening Alliances

"We are honoured to announce that we gave them [Palestinian terrorists] the technology of how to make Fajr-5 missiles and now they have their hands on plenty of them."
Mohammad Ali Jafari, commander of Iran's elite Revolutionary Guards

 And without one shadow of a doubt Hamas was honoured to receive those gifts.  They much enhanced their ability to demonstrate their ability to reach further into Israel than was formerly imagined possible.  And that outreach has burnished their reputation within the Gaza Strip and the West Bank to an immeasurable degree.  

Leaving Hamas a trifle conflicted; should they remain with Iran, or take the leap for Qatar?

Iran has the arms, though no longer able to fund Hamas as generously as formerly, while Qatar doesn't offer state-of-the-art rocketry, but is replenishing the vanishing Hamas treasury.  Besides which, nothing in the Middle East is ever straightforward; when complications ensue they are burdened by entanglements and estrangements seen nowhere else in the world in their complex and tortuous routes.

While Ismail Haniyeh, Gaza's Hamas prime minister feels few compunctions about maintaining traditional close ties with Iran, even though Iran is Shia and Hamas is Sunni, and the current deadly conflict in Syria sees the Shia-Alawite regime slaughtering Sunni Muslims, including Palestinians lapping over into Lebanon, Khaled Meshaal, the political master of Hamas  has withdrawn his alliance with Iran, in support of the Syrian rebels.

Leaving a rather unamicable gap of conflicting alliances between the two Hamas leaders.  Even while thanks to the weapons facility near Khartoum in Sudan, owned by Iran and bombed by Israeli planes last month, Iran outfitted dozens of long-range rockets and rocket-producing materials to Hamas's Gaza Strip underground factories. Even while Iran withdrew funding for Hamas as a result of the split between it and political Hamas.

For its part, Iran has no real reason to mourn its perhaps/perhaps-not loss of Hamas in its trifecta of military offensives against Israel.  Even though Syria may yet fall to the rebels and be lost to Iran, it still has Hezbollah committed to their alliance, and the prospect for engaging the Palestinian Islamic Jihad and other equally-committed jihadis to the destruction of Israel is fairly well assured. 

Iran's parliamentary speaker Ali Larijani, speaking for his country's supreme leader on a visit to Damascus offered a grave promise of commitment to leaders of Palestinian militant groups.  Iran is prepared to support and increase "the resistance's capabilities in confronting the Zionist arrogance and aggression".  And it is even possible that disgruntlement over Iran's support of Syria in slaughtering Syrian Sunnis can be overcome, in gratefulness over Iran's arms support to Hamas.

And then, with both Islamic Jihad and Hamas generously supplied with arms by Iran, the Islamic Republic of Iran will have been successful in extending its reach into the Arab Muslim world for proxies and useful militias all of whom share the common goal of the destruction of Israel.