[spwa4]

Israel did not set up Hamas, Israel prevented the PA, then the PLO, which was taken over and supported by the KGB from massacring Hamas in it's krib.

That's one very underappreciated part of the conflict there. That the KGB and Israel fought one another, obviously long ago. As part of that fight, they both helped/financed/protected/... lunatic Palestinian movements. The KGB is long dead and Israel started regretting many of it's actions against Russia decades ago, but the lunatic movements each created are still massacring one another.

Oh and the UN is still supporting and financing the PA, even against Hamas. Hmmm, I wonder if anyone at the top of the UN ever had any affiliation with Soviet Foreign policy ... (say, for example, the best-paid politician in the entire world, obviously a communist)

[srean]

What I am claiming isn't even controversial. It's quite well known and accepted. So much so all the standard search engines will confirm it, and search engines typically reflect a consensus view of crawlable documents.

This is what I get when I pose the question

"Yes, Israeli officials have acknowledged providing covert financial support to Sheikh Ahmed Yassin’s Islamist networks in Gaza during the late 1970s and 1980s. This was done to bolster religious groups as a counterweight to the secular Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), which was viewed as the primary adversary at the time"

[dlubarov]

This is a common talking point, but if we look at the underlying facts of what Israel did to "support" or "set up" Hamas, they... allowed Qatar to provide aid to Gaza to fund some infrastructure and civil servants' salaries. Would you have preferred that they block the aid and Gaza's governance collapse?