A senior leader of the Palestinian Hamas movement has offered an account of how in one tranche of cash aid, the Islamic Republic provided his group with $22 million back in 2006. 

In an interview with the state-funded Arabic-language news network Al-Alam, Mahmoud al-Zahar said during a visit to Tehran as Gaza’s foreign minister, he and eight other members of his delegation received the nine suitcases before departure from an airport in Tehran. “In the meeting, I raised with him our problems with salary payments and social services in Gaza,” al-Zahar said of his discussions with the former commander of Iran’s Quds Force who was killed in a US airstrike in Baghdad Jan. 3.

“Soleimani was quick to respond to our demand. The day after, I saw $22 million in cash inside suitcases each weighing 40 kilos. Since it was only nine of us, we couldn’t carry any [more],” al-Zahar added, praising the Iranian commander as “a man of honesty and action.”

Iran’s financial support for “resistance groups” fighting the Israeli occupation has been a fundamental tenet of the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Israel and several Western countries, however, consider Tehran’s assistance to Hamas, Lebanon’s Hezbollah and a host of other militant groups in the Middle East state sponsorship of terrorism.