[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?

[srean]

I am talking about something that is from decades earlier. The Google search results I quoted summarises that quite well.