Former Israeli officials have openly acknowledged Israel's role in providing funding and assistance to Yassin's network as a means of undermining the secular, left-wing Palestinian factions that made up the PLO.
[23] Brigadier General
Yitzhak Segev, who served as the Israeli military governor in Gaza during the early 1980s, admitted to providing financial assistance to
Mujama al-Islamiya, the precursor of Hamas, on the instruction of the Israeli authorities.
[2] Former
Israeli Civil Administration director
Efraim Sneh stated in 1992 that "we saw the fundamentalists mainly as an unthreatening social force aiming to improve the bad conditions and standards of living of the Palestinians ... We know now that we must make a distinction between Hamas, with whom we have nothing in common, and the moderates, mainstream secular elements among the Palestinians."
[15] In 2018, historian
Uri Milstein quoted
Yitzhak Mordechai, who served as head of the
Southern Command from 1986 to 1989, as saying that "I was very familiar with Gaza from my previous positions. But when I took charge of the Southern Command, I was shocked by the number of mosques that had been recently constructed in Gaza. As it turned out, Israel’s strategists had been supportive of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin’s charitable organization."
[24]