Brig. Gen. Yitzhak Segev, who was the Israeli military governor in Gaza in the early 1980s, later told a New York Times reporter that he had helped finance the Palestinian Islamist movement as a “counterweight” to the secularists and leftists of the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Fatah party, led by Yasser Arafat (who himself referred to Hamas as “a creature of Israel.”)

https://theintercept.com/2018/02/19/hamas-israel-palestine-conflict/