NEW DELHI: Concerns over continuous engagement between Palestinian militant group Hamas and Pakistan-based terror groups may have been revived with a picture of senior Hamas leader Naji Zaheer meeting with leaders of the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), but experts have cautioned over an indirect threat rather than a direct threat to India’s security. While the engagement between Hamas and Pakistan-based terror groups is not new and has been continuously going on especially over the last three years, a latest undated video of Hamas leader Naji Zaheer being welcomed by LeT leaders at an event in Pakistan’s Gujranwala has thrown the spotlight on the bonhomie between Hamas and Pakistan-based terror groups.
In pictures from the same event that went viral on social media on Wednesday, Zaheer can be seen meeting with LeT leader Rashid Ali Sandhu, who identifies himself as the vice president of the Gujranwala division of the Pakistan Markazi Muslim League (PMML)—the political face of the banned groups Jamaat-Ud-Dawa (JuD), LeT and Milli Muslim League (MML)—which participated in the February 2024 general elections in Pakistan but registered a dismal performance. However, this is not the first time that Zaheer, a Hamas commander and special representative of Hamas leader Khaled Mashal to Pakistan, has attended meetings with Pakistani terror elements and officials.
In fact, there have been a series of meetings between Zaheer and other Hamas leaders with Pakistani leaders since 2023. According to a report prepared by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), a US-based organisation that provides translations of Arabic, Persian, Urdu-Pashto, Dari, Turkish, Russian and Chinese media reports to the US government and its allies, Hamas representative Ali Baraka had met Aftab Khokhar, the then Pakistani ambassador to Lebanon, at the headquarters of the Pakistani Embassy in Beirut.
On October 14, 2023—just a week after the Hamas attack on Israeli civilians, Zaheer had met with Maulana Fazlur Rehman, the chief of the largest Pakistani Islamist political party, the Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam-Fazl (JUI-F), in Peshawar to discuss the situation in Gaza, MEMRI reported. Since then, Zaheer has been continuously engaging with Pakistan-based outfits and has addressed several conferences held in Pakistan either in person or via video conferencing.
On November 5, 2023, Rehman had met with deceased Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh and the acting chairman of the Hamas Political Bureau Khaled Mashal in Qatar. That meeting was widely discussed in India too as after the same, the JUI-F tweeted pictures of Mashal with its leaders and claimed in the tweet that Khaled had stated during the meeting that “Kashmir and Palestine have been a long-standing test for human rights advocates”. Zaheer has addressed different events in Pakistan in 2023, 2024 and 2025 including an anti-Israel rally in Karachi, the Al-Aqsa Storm and Gaza Martyrs Conference in Larkana, Sindh, and had attended a private high-level discussion on Gaza “resistance” held in Islamabad.
Further, leaders like Khaled Qaddoumi, the Special Representative of Hamas in Tehran, too have visited Pakistan and met with former Senate members and other Pakistani politicians including members of the Jamaat-e-Islami in 2023 and 2024. In April 2024, Zaheer was honoured by the Islamabad High Court Bar Association while in July 2024, he met with a delegation of the Islamist Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan party. It was the meeting between Mashal and senior PMML leader and UN-designated terrorist Saifullah Kasuri in August 2024 that had grabbed eyeballs from across the world including India.
But perhaps, the most significant moment in the Hamas-Pakistan terror groups engagement came in February 2025 when Zaheer along with Qaddoumi and other Hamas leaders attended the “Kashmir Solidarity and Hamas Operation Al-Aqsa Flood Conference,” as reported by MEMRI. According to MEMRI, the meeting was also attended by Maulana Masood Asghar, the chief of Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM) which was behind the 1999 hijacking of Air India Flight IC-814, the 2001 attack on the Indian Parliament, the 2016 Pathankot airbase attack and the 2019 Pulwama suicide bombing, which killed 40 Indian soldiers.
MEMRI states that on February 5, 2025, “another conference on Kashmir took place in Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir’s Mirpur where Hamas representative Sheikh Mahmoud Yousef Al-Shabki spoke drawing parallels between Kashmir and Gaza.
Speaking to TSG, experts of India-Pakistan affairs said that while meetings between Hamas leaders and leaders of Pakistan-based terror groups is not a new phenomenon, India has a more indirect threat from such an engagement rather than a direct one.
Harsh V. Pant, vice president, Observer Research Foundation (ORF) and Studies said that while Hamas is not likely to engage with India directly as it has a lot of issues to deal with in the Middle-East and the region comprising Israel, Hamas engaging with Pakistan’s terror elements is a matter of concern for India because terror elements learn from each other and the question is what the terror outfits of Pakistan can learn from Hamas.
“The concern is about what can happen in the future and what the terror outfits of Pakistan can learn from Hamas. Now these groups are redefining territories and Hamas is seen in Pakistan as having punctured the Israeli security apparatus (in October 2023). Terror elements learn from each other and the concern is about what terror outfits of Pakistan can learn from Hamas,” he said. Pant added that if leaders of Hamas are being felicitated in Pakistan, it is because Hamas is seen as having successfully delivered on the radical agenda by targeting Israel.
About some leaders participating in conferences like Kashmir Solidarity and also making statements on Kashmir, Pant said that any Hamas leader would do it to ensure that his message resonates among the radicals of Pakistan whose main agenda is the occupation of Kashmir and the motive behind raking the Kashmir issue is to play along the narrative that suits such Pakistani elements.
Pant opined that India should keep a watch on what tactics such Pakistani terror elements can learn from Hamas because the Islamic factory there may take inspiration from this mechanism and continue to spread terror in the subcontinent using those tactics.
Sushant Sareen, senior fellow at the ORF and an expert of India-Pakistan affairs told TSG that while Hamas association with Pakistan is not new, Indian security agencies need to keep a watch on what tactical knowledge sharing can happen between the two sides given that terror outfits tend to cooperate with each other.
“While we don’t have an indication of a direct threat posed by Hamas to India, what India needs to be concerned about is the fact that terror groups tend to learn from each other. So, it is the sharing of the tactical knowledge between Hamas and the Pakistan-based terror groups that will matter,” he said.
