CEP Senior Director Dr. Hans-Jakob Schindler said: "Hamas over the years has made sure that it has several overlapping income streams, so that if you pressure one of them, it can substitute it with others. So the biggest pots really are, until about the beginning of October, anything that went on in Gaza. So any economic activity, but also taxes and levies on any aid money that came into Gaza, this is unfortunately a sad truth. Secondly, strategically, Qatar. $30 million per month was the official sum they admitted, very likely much more than that. In part from the Qatari government, but also Qatari donors directly into the Hams coffers. Iran has already been mentioned, material support within weapons, arms, ammunitions, trainings, but also money. And then we have the investment portfolio. Unfortunately, Hamas is not yet classified by a terrorist organization in many countries of the world..."

"In comments to the Voice of America’s news website, Edmund Fitton-Brown, a former senior UN counterterrorism official who is now an adviser to the nonprofit Counter Extremism Project, said: 'The presence of Al-Qaeda in Iran is a sort of a chip that the Iranians have. They’re not entirely sure how or when they might play it but . . . it was something that they considered to have potential value.”'"

"'The presence of al-Qaida in Iran is a sort of a chip that the Iranians have,' said Edmund Fitton-Brown, a former senior United Nations counterterrorism official who is now an adviser to the nonprofit Counter Extremism Project.

'They're not entirely sure how or when they might play it but … it was something that they considered to have potential value,' Fitton-Brown told VOA, adding that al-Adel running the terror group from Tehran is 'not that big a change from what the situation was before Zawahiri was killed.'

'Al-Qaida has always been a consultative organization,' he said. 'They have a Shura, a leadership, and Saif was already part of it. He was already a very important voice in that leadership. He's now a more important voice in that leadership.'"

CEP Senior Advisor Radek Sikorski writes: "On 17 October, the Council of the European Union agreed to a new package of human rights-related sanctions against 11 Iranian individuals and four entities linked to Tehran’s crackdown on protesters and the death of Amini – including Iran’s morality police. It is in this context that there is a need to reflect on how Europe’s narrowly focused pursuit of a nuclear deal (officially called the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA) has prevented it from taking meaningful action against ongoing human rights violations in Iran."