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A Chapter of: The Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, and Bedouin Gun Runners

Iran and the West Bank: Push and Pull

On May 8, 2018, the Trump administration withdrew the United States from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), a multilateral deal to remove various sanctions on Iran in exchange for limits on its nuclear program.20 The move was part of the Trump administration’s “maximum pressure” campaign, which aimed to restrict Iran’s influence across the Middle East through sanctions and targeted military operations against high-value assets. Iran responded to the new American strategy by beginning to exceed limits to its nuclear enrichment program mandated by the JCPOA, increasing its attacks on U.S. allies in the Gulf, and expanding its support for proxies across the Middle East, including significantly increasing its support for Hamas starting in July 2019. 

Despite Iran’s newly aggressive approach, Palestinian militant groups did not conduct large-scale attacks on Israel from 2019 to 2020, as both Hamas and the Iranian-backed Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) group favored talks with Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas to form a unity government as their preferred means of expanding their footprint in the West Bank.21 Dissident factions within Fatah—the largest Palestinian political party which leads the PA—that opposed Abbas similarly viewed talks positively as a means to gain political representation.22

The prospect of reconciliation between these factions collapsed on April 29, 2021, when Abbas indefinitely canceled parliamentary elections scheduled for May, after which Hamas, PIJ, and dissident Fatah groups resorted to violence to expand their influence in the West Bank.23 The demand for weapons in the West Bank after April 2021 served as a powerful pull factor that further drew Iranian resources to the area and triggered a large-scale uprising against Israel. 

Without such a pull factor, patron-client relationships rarely yield successful results in proxy warfare. Except in the most extreme cases, patrons such as Iran can rarely push their clients to engage in widespread and prolonged acts of rebellion without sufficient demand for action among the client’s core constituency. By contrast, sufficient demand or pull factors among a client group can attract support from otherwise unengaged patrons. The conditions driving patrons like Iran to support clients are described in this paper as push factors—that is, the will and capacity of states to direct resources to groups abroad.

For West Bank militants and Iran, the pull and push factors incentivizing both sides to cooperate from 2021 to 2024 were strong and drew in groups in Jordan, which could facilitate weapons shipments. For Iran, the push factors were largely driven by the country’s rivalry with the United States, which spurred Iran to both strengthen its proxy network and reinvest in its conventional military forces.

After Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack on Israel, Jordan cracked down on smugglers within its borders, separating Iranian operatives in southern Syria from their proxies in the West Bank. The December 8, 2024, overthrow of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, along with the tightening of U.S. sanctions on Iran in 2025, further limited the push factors enabling Tehran to instigate violence in the West Bank. The joint U.S.-Israeli war in Iran beginning on February 28, 2026, and the subsequent U.S. blockade of Iranian oil exports could reduce Iran’s capacity to support proxies at various points in the short and medium terms. However, despite this, many of the pull factors described in this report remain relevant and, if left unaddressed, could be exploited by other patrons with greater capacity. 

The rest of this section is divided into three sub-sections. The first will review the social and political dynamics that led the West Bank toward a political crisis that exploded after April 2021 and created a powerful series of pull factors attracting Iranian resources to the area. The second will describe the push factors that incentivized Iran to reestablish ties to proxy groups across the region beginning in 2018. The last sub-section will provide a detailed account of the Palestinian uprising that occurred in the West Bank from 2021 to 2024 as a result of these factors. 

Pull Factors: Growing Demand

In January 2021, PA President Mahmoud Abbas scheduled new parliamentary elections for May 2021, the first to be held in the West Bank since 2006.24 The move came after a decade of internal fighting within Fatah that had left the group divided between several competing factions. Though Hamas was expected to run and do well in the elections, the race was also contested by three rival Fatah blocs: the first, led by Abbas himself, and two dissident groups led by Mohammed Dahlan and Marwan al-Barghouti.25 

The elections were intended to relieve tensions between these factions, which had begun to arm themselves in anticipation of Abbas vacating power. At 85 years old, Abbas had repeatedly been hospitalized for cancer and heart procedures, leading many to suspect that he might die or step down and trigger a succession crisis. This uncertainty pushed Dahlan, al-Barghouti, and Abbas loyalists to arm themselves in anticipation of a violent power struggle.26 However, on April 29, 2021, Abbas indefinitely postponed the elections following polling that showed his ticket stood to win less than a quarter of the total seats. The move triggered new tensions between these factions, each of which represented rival sections of society.27

Backed by the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Mohammed Dahlan was a former member of Fatah’s leadership faction alongside Abbas who lived in exile in Tunisia from 1982 to 1994 before returning to the Palestinian territories following the establishment of the PA.28 After occupying numerous high-level positions in the Gaza Strip, Dahlan was expelled from Fatah in 2011 following allegations that he plotted a coup against Abbas.29 Fighting between Dahlan supporters and PA forces first occurred in August 2016 and then escalated in December 2016, when dozens of Dahlan loyalists were expelled from Fatah’s Revolutionary Council and Central Committee and arrested, prompting clashes in and around Nablus city.30 

Seen as close to the United States and Israel, Dahlan was instrumental in organizing the 2020 Abraham Accords, the normalization deal brokered by the Trump administration between Israel and the UAE, Bahrain, and Morocco, which the PA opposed, perceiving it to undermine the organization’s authority. These and other efforts by Dahlan to expand his influence prompted more crackdowns on his supporters in the West Bank, pushing many to take up arms.31

By contrast, Marwan al-Barghouti represented a different social and ideological cohort within Fatah, one that was far more radical and whose membership widely overlapped with Hamas, including within al-Barghouti’s immediate and extended family.32 Originally from the area north of Ramallah around the village of Kobar, the extended al-Barghouti household is part of a collection of wealthy, urban West Bank families known as a’ayan (notables) who had historically governed Palestinian districts on behalf of the Ottomans and owned large plots of land across the Levant. This changed in the 1980s, when Israel carried out seizures of a’ayan landholdings that were either used to construct Israeli settlements or redistributed to second-tier rural tribal elites who were also invested with political power. In 1983, the Israel Land Authority made significant seizures of land in Kobar and the neighboring town of Baytilu that were used to construct the settlement of Nahliel in 1985. As a result of these and other seizures, in 1987 a’ayan families were among the top coordinators of the First Intifada, which lasted until 1993; they later became known as the “intifada elite.”33 

Historically, Ramallah was a relatively small West Bank town with a Christian-majority population whose local elite was less influential than their counterparts in larger cities such as Nablus and Hebron.34 However, beginning in 1953, Ramallah and surrounding towns such as al-Bireh, Birzeit, and others grew in importance after the founding of Birzeit University by a local Protestant family who modeled the institution after the Protestant missionary education system. 

Soon, Birzeit University became the top college in the West Bank, attracting upper-middle-class a’ayan students from across the region.35 The influx of students made the area a hub for leftist groups, with Ramallah becoming an organizing center for the Palestinian Communist party and Birzeit becoming a hotbed for Ba’ath party activity.36 

Following the First Intifada, leftist factions such as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine expanded their influence in Ramallah via a network of NGOs with ties to similar groups in Europe.37 However, beginning in the 1990s, Islamist groups—in particular Hamas, whose power within Birzeit’s student union grew during this period—began to contest leftists’ dominance over the area’s educated middle class.38

Following the creation of the PA in 1994, Fatah members from the a’ayan intifada elite quickly found themselves at odds with the more moderate Fatah leadership that returned from exile in Tunisia—derisively referred to as “the Tunisians.” With few exceptions, Fatah’s “Tunisian” leadership excluded younger intifada elite cadres from the Fatah Central Committee and PA security forces, partnering instead with rural clan and tribal leaders.39 

Following the outbreak of the Second Intifada in 2000, Marwan al-Barghouti emerged as a de facto leader within the intifada elite, becoming a prominent leader within the Fatah Higher Movement Committee, a rival to the Fatah Central Committee. Over the next five years, Fatah militias led by al-Barghouti, in particular Tanzim and the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade (AAMB)—al-Barghouti has denied charges of affiliation with AAMB, though not Tanzim—cooperated with Hamas in attacks against Israel.40 During this period, many of al-Barghouti’s relatives served as Hamas commanders, pushing Israel to arrest al-Barghouti in 2002.41

Hamas’s growing influence within the urban a’ayan cohort became clear during PA municipal and legislative elections held in 2004–2005 and in 2006. In the former, Hamas won control of nearly every urban center except Ramallah, where quotas for Christian candidates forced the group to accept a disproportionately low number of seats compared to its vote share. In these elections, Hamas performed best in Nablus (where it won 73 percent of votes), the Ramallah suburb of al-Bireh (72 percent), and Hebron. Fatah’s victories, by contrast, were concentrated almost exclusively in rural regions home to its traditional tribal allies.42 Later, during the 2006 elections for the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC), Hamas performed best in Nablus, Hebron, and Ramallah, where it won 80–100 percent of seats.43 

Hamas’s influence in the West Bank began to wane in June 2007, after the group seized control of the Gaza Strip from the PA in a weeklong civil war, after which Abbas formally suspended the PLC and arrested hundreds of Hamas operatives.44 In its place, dissident Fatah groups with ties to Dahlan and al-Barghouti gradually emerged to fill the gap. Throughout the 2010s, Dahlan cultivated support in refugee camps and low-income areas of Nablus and Jenin provinces.45 By contrast, in Ramallah and other urban areas, al-Barghouti still retained the support of many a’ayan urbanites who viewed him as a useful bulwark against the PA’s “Tunisian” cohort.46 Since his 2002 arrest, Hamas leaders regularly included al-Barghouti on lists of prisoners it demanded in exchange for Israeli hostages and came to view him as a useful ally within Fatah.47

In 2009, Abbas attempted to co-opt swaths of the urban a’ayan cohort by engineering the election of al-Barghouti to the Fatah Central Committee while al-Barghouti was in prison, in an election that many alleged to have been rigged.48 However, Abbas’s failure to call new PLC elections, along with a general tightening of control over PA courts and security services over the next decade, created dissatisfaction within Fatah ranks that led to the reemergence of divisions more than a decade later.49

Following the cancellation of the PLC elections on April 29, 2021, tensions between these factions escalated as Hamas and dissident Fatah groups increasingly came to view violence as the only means to expand their power in the West Bank.50 In the months leading up to the scheduled elections, Mohammed Dahlan in particular had increased his own financing to allies in the West Bank, including armed groups, while AAMB factions took steps to unify their ranks.51

By this point, Iran had resumed financial assistance to Hamas after having distanced itself from the group in 2012 due to Hamas’s support for Sunni rebels who fought the Assad regime in Syria, a gap that grew wider in 2015 with Hamas’s opposition to the Iranian-backed Houthi rebel group in Yemen.52 In 2021, with the full backing of Iran, Hamas responded to the cancellation of PA elections by initiating its first major war with Israel since 2014, firing hundreds of rockets into Jerusalem on May 10 and triggering 11 days of violence by both sides that left nearly 300 people dead and thousands more wounded.53

During the Gaza fighting, cells affiliated with the Iranian-backed Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) faction in the West Bank, operating in solidarity with Hamas, carried out attacks against Israel Defense Forces (IDF) forces in Hebron. These attacks provoked a series of tit-for-tat exchanges that led to the largest surge in violence in the West Bank since the “knife intifada” in 2015 and 2016, when hundreds of Palestinians carried out lone-wolf stabbing attacks against Israelis in the West Bank, Jerusalem, and Israel itself.54 

AAMB factions quickly joined PIJ to launch attacks against IDF troops across the West Bank, particularly around the northern city of Jenin, with the AAMB Liwa al-Amudi sub-unit backed by Muhammad Dahlan issuing specific calls to members of the PA security forces to defect and help repel “Israeli aggression.”55

For the next two years, PIJ commanders Bassam Sa’adi and Tariq Azz al-Din—the latter based in the Gaza Strip—played an outsized role in coordinating weapons shipments for Palestinian militant groups between Syria and the West Bank.56 At the same time, in mid-2021, members of the Jordanian Muslim Brotherhood began traveling to Lebanon, where they allegedly received training from Hizbollah or Hamas operatives in missile production, knowledge they used to manufacture rockets in Jordan that were also smuggled to Palestinian groups in the West Bank.57 

By August 2022 and throughout 2023, this confluence of factors pushed violence in the West Bank to its most lethal point since the Second Intifada, a process that was actively facilitated by Iran, which launched an expanded weapons smuggling campaign from Syria, including large volumes of high-quality explosives used to make IEDs that targeted Israeli convoys.58 

Push Factors: Iranian Expansion

Despite its significance, the escalation in the West Bank represented just one theater in a broader Iranian effort to expand its global military footprint in response to real and perceived threats from the United States that began several years earlier in 2018. This change was the latest in a series of shifts in Iran’s strategy to confront the United States since the early 2000s.

After 9/11, Iran interpreted the initial U.S. invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan as attempts to establish a direct Western military presence on its borders, pushing it to cultivate a network of armed proxies—in Iraq in particular—capable of weakening the U.S. position. Following the United States’ failure in both theaters, Iranian leadership embraced a new view that the United States would instead adopt a new “hybrid” warfare strategy to overthrow the regime, using indirect means.59 

This position gained powerful currency within Iran following the outbreak of the country’s “Green” protest movement, a series of mass demonstrations by the Iranian opposition following the country’s June 12, 2009, presidential elections that Tehran suspected were organized in Washington. Iran similarly viewed the outbreak of the Arab Spring in 2011 as another U.S.-backed hybrid warfare campaign aimed at overthrowing pro-Iranian governments in Syria and Iraq.60

Tensions waned briefly following the Obama administration’s brokering of the JCPOA in July 2015, after which both American and Iranian military forces and their proxies indirectly coordinated to combat ISIS, expelling the group from most of its territorial holdings in Iraq and Syria by November 2017.61 However, the Trump administration’s abrupt withdrawal from the JCPOA on May 8, 2018, reignited tensions between both countries and pushed Iran to expand its regional military footprint and exceed its JCPOA-mandated limits on nuclear activities.62

For Iran, battles fought against ISIS and Syrian rebel groups from 2015 to 2018 marked a key period of consolidation during which the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) managed to coalesce its disparate network of foreign proxies into an organized, structured ground force capable of fighting conventional battles on its behalf.63 This consolidation of forces within its traditional sphere of influence enabled Iran to shift its focus outward and expand operations in more distant theaters, where its operatives had remained dormant or inactive, including in Jordan and the West Bank.

In 2018 and 2019, Iran’s leadership invested new resources in building out Hizbollah’s domestic drone and missile production capacity in Lebanon in order to reduce the group’s dependence on Iranian weapons shipments.64 At the same time, Iran began delivering Fateh-110 and Zolfagher ballistic missiles to Shi’a proxy forces in Iraq and Burkan-3 ballistic missiles to the Houthis in Yemen, intended to create simultaneous threats on Saudi Arabia’s northern and southern borders.65 

Iran’s offensive posture toward the Arab Gulf states shifted again following the appointment on April 21, 2019, of Hossein Salami—a military strategist who helped develop Iran’s warfare doctrine and publicly called for new offensive measures against the country’s adversaries—as commander of the IRGC.66 

Almost immediately, Salami’s calls manifested in an unprecedented wave of new attacks. Over four months from May to September 2019, Iran and its allies, including the Kata’ib Hizbollah militia in Iraq and the Houthis, carried out four drone, cruise missile, and magnetic mine attacks on shipping, pipelines, and other energy infrastructure in Saudi Arabia and the UAE.67 The final attack, on September 14, targeted Saudi Arabia’s Abqaiq and Khurais oil fields, taking half of Saudi Arabia’s oil production offline and causing a 20 percent spike in world oil prices.68 Both Kata’ib Hizbollah and the Houthis launched additional attacks against Saudi Arabia and the UAE in 2021 and 2022, including an attack on the Saudi royal palace in Riyadh.69 

By mid-2019, Iran also began to publicly signal its intent to recommit resources to the Palestinian cause. On July 22, 2019, Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei hosted a Hamas delegation led by the group’s West Bank commander Saleh al-Arouri, during which Iran pledged to increase its financial support for the group to $30 million per month.70 The move marked a significant shift in Tehran’s stance toward Hamas, following a seven-year period of tension between both parties that began in February 2012 when Hamas declared support for Syria’s opposition against the regime of Bashar al-Assad, a top Iranian client.71 

Despite Hamas’s criticism of the Assad regime, Iran continued to supply the group with weapons in the lead-up to the 2014 war in the Gaza Strip, with Ayatollah Khamenei making explicit calls to arm Palestinian armed groups in the West Bank in the days after the war to relieve pressure on Gaza.72 However, tensions between Hamas and Iran increased again in 2015, when Hamas declared its support for Saudi Arabia and the UAE in their war against the Iranian-backed Houthi group in Yemen.73 Though Iran and Hamas formally reestablished ties in August 2017, by August 2018 Iranian support for Hamas did not exceed $6 million per month.74 Khamenei’s public call to expand support for Hamas in July 2019 signaled Iran’s intent to target Israel, a key U.S. ally, at the same time that Iranian operatives and military forces were carrying out unprecedented waves of attacks against the Arab Gulf states.

By late 2019, Iran’s proxies in Iraq and Syria also began directly targeting U.S. forces, prompting a series of tit-for-tat violent exchanges that gradually escalated and resulted in U.S. forces assassinating Qasem Soleimani, commander of the IRGC’s elite Quds Force unit, outside Baghdad on January 3, 2020.75 As one of the leaders of Iran’s external operations since the mid-1990s, Soleimani’s death served as a major blow to Iran’s proxy network, whose coordination relied heavily on Soleimani’s personal connections, charisma, and knowledge of the vast array of actors aligned with Tehran across the region.76 

Iran also launched new efforts in 2020 to improve its naval, satellite, missile defense, aerospace, and other conventional military capabilities. In April, Tehran launched its first satellite into low earth orbit, both as cover for a potential ballistic missile development program and to expand its ability to gather intelligence to assist in attacks against adversaries. By 2023, Iran had launched at least three more satellites and purportedly provided aerial photos to its Iraqi proxies to use to target U.S. forces in Iraq and Syria.77 The pace of Iran’s satellite launches increased in 2024 and 2025, including in partnership with Russia, which launched Iranian satellites from its own soil.78

By July 2020, members of Iran’s Armed Forces General Staff began regularly meeting with Syrian officials to discuss the deployment of surface-to-air missiles and air defense systems in the country. Iran sought to deploy similar systems in Lebanon and Iraq as part of a broader effort to create an anti-access/area denial zone extending from Iran to the Mediterranean Sea to prevent U.S. and Israeli aircraft from conducting similar strikes on Iranian assets and personnel.79

Iran also made significant progress in its development of a blue-water navy, expanding the range of Iranian forward base ships that could provide support for ground operations in Yemen and carry out sea-launched strikes, quick-reaction naval missions, and other out-of-area maneuvers. From 2020 to 2022, Iranian naval forces deployed a record number of forward base and freighter ships to the Red Sea and Sea of Oman—a buildup that former Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz described in July 2022 as “the most significant Iranian presence in the area in the past decade.”80

Over the next several years, Iran cast its maritime ambitions further afield, deploying the Makran forward base ship—capable of hosting drones, fast attack aircraft, helicopters, and missile launchers—to the Indian and Atlantic Oceans. In February 2023, the Makran sailed from St. Petersburg to Rio de Janeiro, the first Iranian naval vessel to reach South America. Iranian strategy documents published during this period regularly expressed a desire to secure naval access in Madagascar and South Africa (where the Makran successfully docked in April 2023) to establish deterrence against U.S. assets in the Indian Ocean.81 

By 2021, Iran had also recommitted resources to strengthen the IRGC, whose share of Iran’s total defense budget increased from its 2013–2020 average of 24 percent to 28 percent in 2021 and 31 percent in 2022.82 This increase in formal allocations coincided with the growth in Captagon trafficking from Syria, whose value between 2020 and 2021 ranged from an estimated $3.5 billion to $5.7 billion.83 Though no formal estimates exist as to what share of this revenue accrued to the IRGC specifically, over the next several years Iran and its proxies, led by Hizbollah, were directly involved in the management, production, and trafficking of Captagon from Syria.

With additional resources at their disposal, both Iran’s and Hizbollah’s military footprints in Syria grew significantly. The total number of military positions manned by both groups increased from 333 in late 2021 to 469 in mid-2022 and 570 in mid-2023.84 With this infrastructure in place, along with a more confident push by Iran’s leadership to expand its global footprint, Iranian-backed groups in the West Bank launched a renewed campaign of violence against Israeli troops. 

Escalation

By May 2021, both the upper tiers of Iran’s military and the leadership of numerous dissident Palestinian armed groups were adequately prepared to carry out and support a new wave of attacks against Israeli troops in the West Bank. For Iran, the campaign served as a natural extension of its 2019 escalation against the Arab Gulf states following the Trump administration’s withdrawal from the JCPOA. For the Palestinians, the desire to rebel was driven by a slower burning series of tensions between the PA leadership and key swaths of West Bank society that began at least a decade prior. Despite their separate motivations, Abbas’s abrupt decision to cancel the PA elections on April 29, 2021, served as a trigger that quickly united both sides toward a common objective. 

Initially, attacks in the West Bank rose gradually. From May to August, eight Palestinians were killed in five rounds of clashes with Israeli troops, the first increase in violence in the area in five years.85 Militant activity increased again after September 6, when Zakaria al-Zubeidi, a commander of AAMB forces in Jenin during the Second Intifada, and five PIJ prisoners escaped from Israel’s Gilboa prison.86 Though al-Zubeidi was quickly recaptured, his escape inspired a new generation of fighters to take up arms across the West Bank and solidified a new era of AAMB-PIJ collaboration. Shortly thereafter, the AAMB and PIJ groups announced the formation of the “Jenin Battalion,” which acted as a joint operations room for the next several years.87

By 2022, Nablus overtook Jenin as the most violent city in the West Bank, with a powerful insurgent movement emerging there led by Ibrahim al-Nabulsi, known as the “Lion of Nablus.”88 Al-Nabulsi’s father, Aizzat al-Nabulsi, was a colonel in the PA security forces who had been arrested two decades earlier for his involvement in attacks on IDF troops during the Second Intifada.89 Over the summer of 2022, Israel took steps to address the growing violence, arresting Alam al-Ra’i, commander of an AAMB Liwa al-Amudi’s Nablus faction, on July 21, along with PIJ financier Bassam al-Sa’adi in Jenin, in early August.90

In response to al-Sa’adi’s arrest, PIJ forces in the Gaza Strip planned retaliatory missile strikes against Israel, triggering preemptive Israeli strikes that led to a three-day conflict from August 5 to 7 that left 44 Palestinians dead.91 During the fighting on August 6, PIJ Chairman Ziad al-Nakhala and IRGC Chairman Hossein Salami met in Tehran and signed an agreement to expand weapons trafficking to Palestinian militant groups in the West Bank to create a second front that could relieve pressure on forces fighting in Gaza.92 

Shortly after his meeting with al-Nakhala, in an interview published on Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei’s official website, Salami proclaimed, “The struggle in the occupied territories has expanded to all the arenas. Not only is Gaza engaged in resistance and confrontation, but this struggle has moved to the West Bank as well….The West Bank is arming itself more and more against the Zionists.”93 

Over the next several days, Israeli forces arrested dozens of PIJ and Fatah commanders in the West Bank and, on August 9, killed Ibrahim al-Nabulsi in a skirmish in Nablus’s Old City.94 However, rather than stopping militant activity, al-Nabulsi’s killing inspired a wave of mobilization across the West Bank that led to an almost fourfold increase in violence in the area over the next two months.95 In Nablus, local Hamas commander Musa’ab al-Shtayyeh and AAMB leader Wadi al-Houh merged their forces and, by August 15, had begun to operate as the “Lion’s Den” faction, named in honor of Ibrahim al-Nabulsi. Over the next 14 months, the faction carried out nearly half of all violent attacks in the city.96 By October, attacks by Palestinian militant groups against Israeli soldiers had increased 800 percent compared to the same time in 2021.97

The massive explosion of violence in the West Bank after al-Nabulsi’s death was not only driven by a demand for revenge, but also an expanded push by Iran made possible by Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine. In the five months after the invasion and before the IRGC-PIJ agreement in August, Russia redeployed thousands of troops from Syria to Ukraine, including units in the south of the country that had cooperated with Jordanian-backed factions to stem the flow of arms and narcotics smuggled across the border.98 Following the withdrawal of these forces, Iran’s proxies carried out a wave of assassinations against their rivals in southern Syria, enabling them to consolidate control over territory and infrastructure along the border with Jordan and significantly expand the quantity of arms and narcotics smuggled across the region, including into the West Bank.  

The next section of this report will examine the domestic factors within Jordan that enabled the Jordanian Muslim Brotherhood’s rise from 2021 to 2024 and the organization’s role in helping to bridge the gap between Iranian proxies in southern Syria and Palestinian militant groups in the West Bank.

A person in military uniform loads a rocket into a multiple rocket launcher system at dusk, with an armored vehicle visible in the background.
The Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, and Bedouin Gun Runners
Citations
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Iran and the West Bank: Push and Pull

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