Recent months have seen a percipitous decline in Hamas’s strategic and diplomatic standing. The Arab Spring and the Islamist governments that it empowered were seen as a boon to the Iran-backed terror group, but various dynamics in the region – including the Syrian conflict and the deterioration of security in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula – ended up eroding its position.

An article published early last week by Jonathan Schanzer, vice president of research at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, concluded that Hamas has reached a point of unprecedented vulnerability:

The PLO and the Israelis cannot agree on much, but their hatred for Hamas is mutual. And the United States can leverage this by attacking the violent Islamist faction while it is at the most vulnerable point it has been in years… The Egyptian Army’s ongoing operations against the subterranean tunnels connecting Egypt to the Gaza Strip, which have long served as key arteries for bulk cash smuggling, are wreaking havoc on Hamas’s finances. One senior Israeli security official told me that, in the current environment, an additional reduction of 20 to 30 percent in Hamas’ revenues could “destroy” the movement.

To halt its slide, Hamas is moving to restore its relations with Iran and with the Iran-backed terror group Hezbollah, according to reports published in Arabic and Russian media outlets. High-level delegates from the Palestinian terror organization reportedly met last month in Beirut with Iranian and Hezbollah officials:

Representatives of Hamas, the Palestinian Islamist group ruling the Gaza Strip, met with Iranian and Hezbollah officials in Beirut last month in an effort to forge a rapprochement following a lengthy period of tensions, the Arab language daily Asharq al-Awsat reported on Sunday… Asharq al-Awsat quoted a Gaza-based Hamas official, Ahmed Yusuf, as saying that the Palestinian group was reassured that Tehran viewed it as a “strategic partner.”

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