On Tuesday, an Israeli court sentenced Dirar Abu Sisi, a Palestinian engineer, to 21 years in prison for work he did making rockets for the Iranian-funded terror group Hamas.
Specifically, Sisi improved Hamas’s homemade Kassam rockets. He made them longer-range so that the terror group could bomb deeper into Israeli territory. Because of Sisi’s work, the rockets have a range of about 12 miles.
The court’s ruling said:
There is no dispute over the severity of the accused’s actions. He was one of the top people involved in improving the destructive ability of Hamas’s munitions and rockets and he was dominant in facilitating Hamas’s ability to strike Israeli soldiers and civilians more effectively.
“The accused has been found guilty of offences carried out over a number of years against state security that include five specific accusations carried out by him,” it also stated.
The two major counts against Sisi are membership in a militant organization and aiding the construction of weapons used against Israel.
Sisi, 46, also worked as an engineer of Gaza’s only power plant, which was destroyed in airstrikes.
Originally, Sisi was arrested in Ukraine in 2011, which sparked protests in Palestinian-occupied territories. At the time, he claimed he was guilty of no wrong-doing, but he later pleaded guilty in the Israeli court.
Earlier this week, militants within Gaza shot rockets into Israeli territory, and the Israeli Defense Force responded to the rockets with airstrikes.
From 2001 to 2014, 44 Israelis have been killed in rocket strikes, including women and children.
On August 18, 1988, Hamas, the terror group to which the court determined Sisi belonged, released a charter explaining its goals. In it, they identified Hamas as the Muslim Brotherhood in Palestine, and discussed the criteria they have determined will qualify as “national liberation,” namely, the expulsion of the Jewish people from Israel.
“Allah is its target, the Prophet is its model, the Koran its constitution: Jihad is its path and death for the sake of Allah is the loftiest of its wishes,” one article says.
“The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him,” one verse the charter cites states.
Earlier this year, reports emerged detailing that Iran has been increasing funding for the terror organization, even though Hamas and the Iranian ayatollahs belong to different warring factions of Islam.
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