In a recent television interview, senior Hamas leader Mahmoud Al-Zahar said, despite recent tensions, Iran remains a strong supporter of Hamas and believes that the terrorist group is "capable of liberating Palestine."

Al-Zahar made the comments in an interview on Lebanese station Palestine Today TV​ that aired in February. In his remarks, the Hamas leader defended the group's relationship with Iran and said that Hamas had remained focused on the Israeli enemy (translation via the MEMRI):

AL-ZAHAR: We have maintained that countries that believe in our ideology and can help us - countries like Iran that believe we are capable of liberating Palestine... These are the countries with which we must develop relations...

We did not join the PLO when it acted against Jordan in 1970, and we did not join its wars in Beirut and against Hafez Al-Assad. We did not join the PLO when it supported one Arab country that occupied another Arab country. To this day, we have never intervened in the internal Arab conflicts, even in countries where we lived, like Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, or elsewhere. We have kept our force directed at the Israeli enemy.

As Arutz Sheva explains, the relationship between Hamas and Iran were temporarily strained when Hamas refused to support Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad, whom Iran backed. In response, Iran stopped supplying Hamas weapons for a time. In recent months, however, the ties between Iran and the terrorist group have been strengthening:

Nevertheless, the two sides have been getting closer in recent months as Tehran has been clandestinely supplying Hamas with arms and financial support. The speaker of the Iranian parliament, Ali Larijani, recently boasted that Iran provided Hamas with the technology it has used to rain down rockets on Israel from Gaza, and Hamas later thanked Iran for providing the group with the rockets.

The Al-Hayat newspaper recently revealed that Hamas leader-in-exile Khaled Mashaal met with Iranian Revolutionary Guards commander Qasem Solemeini, in Turkey, just days after the end of Operation Protective Edge in Gaza over the summer.