The Times: Hamas Exploited Libya's Chaos to Smuggle Arms to Gaza

The Palestinian militant group Hamas used the chaos of Libya’s civil war to set up an arms-smuggling group that tried to funnel anti-aircraft and anti-tank missiles to Gaza, documents shown to The Times revealed

The Newspaper added that the group, set up by Marwan alAshqar, the Hamas envoy to Libya, was given the job of perting arms intended for Libyan battlefields through Egypt.

The report noted that requests from the Hamas leadership would arrive in encrypted emails that used codewords for weapons, according to judicial files. Ashqar would reply using messages inserted into the text of ebooks, which were then encrypted and emailed to his superiors.

Ashqar, who was never officially recognised by the Libyan authorities as an envoy, was arrested along with three other Palestinians in 2017 after interior ministry forces had grown suspicious of the armed men who would frequent the offices of his business in Tripoli.

The men were found guilty in a Libyan court two years later of smuggling and possessing weapons and were sentenced to ten years in prison. Hamas denies the allegations against the group.

According to the judicial records, seen by The Times, Ashqar confessed to having been ordered to procure weapons for Hamas leaders at a 2011 meeting in Gaza attended by the group’s leaders including Ismail Haniyeh. He was provided with a Palestinian diplomatic passport to ease his task.

Hamas was seeking to exploit the chaos of the post-Gaddafi years in Libya and Ashqar initially operated from the east, where jihadists had taken over two cities. He moved to Tripoli after the militants suffered a series of defeats and ran a company there as a cover. His request to establish a Hamas office was never granted by the Libyan authorities.