Hamas Hastily Orders Leaders to Stop Pissing Off the Egyptian Army

Hamas has lost international backers and seen its domestic popularity slide. It is facing the prospect of economic suffocation, as the Egyptians move to shut down the lucrative smuggling tunnels between the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip and the Sinai Peninsua down by Egypt. Its rival Palestinian Fatah faction has taken to all but openlymocking it.

In an attempt to maintain political control over the Gaza Strip, Hamas has censored the press and stifled dissent. It has sought to boost its popularity by conducting terror attacks against Israel.

The Iran-backed group’s fortures were thought to be on the ascendancy as recently as a year ago. Hamas is an off-shoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, and the electoral success of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood-linked Freedom and Justice Party was supposed to empower the organization. Even after the Brotherhood was stripped of political power by the Egyptian army in the wake of mass unrest, Hamas continued antagonizing the military.

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The evaluation of Hamas’s weakness echoes that of Jonathan Schanzer, vice president for research at Foundation for Defense of Democracies, who this summer published a call for diplomacy aimed at cripping the organization.

http://www.thetower.org/loss-allies-funding-threatens-hamas-authority/Read the full article here.