With Israel’s current military operation in Gaza has generated renewed interest in Hamas’ strategy of using human shields as a central tool in the terrorist organizations strategy.

Israel’s Defense Force is targeting Hamas weapons caches to reduce the number of long-range missiles, rockets, munitions, and arms. On a practical level, however, Hamas leaders and terrorist fighters deliberately use human shields to hide themselves and their arms in mosques, schools, and crowded residential areas.

But Hamas’ calculated strategy of putting Palestinian civilians in harms way is anything but new. It is an core part of the group’s terror machine.

Just read and watch to Hamas MP Fathi Hammad’s proud February 2008 confession in Gaza on Al AqsaTV, captured by the MEMRI TV Project:

The enemies of Allah do not know that the Palestinian people has developed its (methods) of death and death-seeking. For the Palestinian people, death has become an industry at which women excel, and so do all the people living on this land. The elderly excel at this, and so do the mujahideen and the children. This is why they have formed human shields of the women, the children, the elderly, and the mujahideen in order to challenge the Zionist bombing machine. It is as if they were saying to the Zionist enemy: “We desire death like you desire life.”

Listening to his exhortation is like watching Hitler’s fanaticism.

There is a disturbing parallel between Hamas’ and the Nazi’s shared hatred of, and desire to eliminate, the Jewish people.

Mahmoud Zahar a/k/a al-Zahar, a Hamas terror hardliner and “the real power behind the Hamas prime minister, Ismail Haniyeh,” claimed today that his terrorist group’s rocket attacks on Israel are not a problem.

Zahar readily admits to smuggling $42 million U.S. dollars in cash into Gaza for Hamas, telling Der Spiegel: “I personally once brought $20 million from Iran to the Gaza Strip in a suitcase. No, actually twice — the second time it was $22 million.”

Sunday Times reporter Christine Toomey, suggests that Zahar should not be taken at his word. When she wrote an investigative piece trying to figure out what happened to captured Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, the right-hand man to Hamas’ Ismail Haniyah gave her this cagey response:

“Nobody from the political or military wing of Hamas knows where Shalit is,” he says, disingenuously, sitting by my side in a starched safari suit. “Only the small group who kidnapped him know. They are very secretive.”

In a 2006 interview with another Sunday Times reporter, Zahar vowed that Hamas didn’t have to give up weapons for peace. “Why, why do we have to give up our weapons?” When asked how Hamas would make internal political decisions if it assumed power in Gaza, Zahar retorted: “”Why are you interested in that? We have no problems. We are not using guns to choose our representatives. We are not using guns in the primaries. We use knives.” And he refused to answer journalist Stephen Farrell’s question on whether Hamas “moved from being the IRA to being Sinn Fein”, laughing instead.

Zahar believes that “Christian Zionism” (i.e., Christians who support Israel) is “criminal.”

Zahar openly vows never to recognize Israel’s existence: “Israel is not a legitimate entitity, and no amount of pressure can force us to recognize its right to exist.”

Senior Hamas Military Commander Mohammed Ma’aruf was killed in an Israeli Air Force strike on Saturday, January 3, 2009. Also killed was Abu Zakaria al-Jamal, another senior military figure in the terrorist group’s armed wing.


According to the IDF, a vehicle transporting Ma’aruf and an additional Hamas operative in Khan Younis Gaza was successfully targeted.   Ma’aruf was a senior member of the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades, the terrorist group’s military wing, and was an officer in the terror organization’s ground forces.

Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs has extensive background information on Hamas’ military wing (although individuals named may have been killed, or operational details of the terrorist group may have changed):

In the past few years, especially since the disengagement, Hamas’s military-terrorist infrastructure has gradually transformed itself into a hierarchical structure with semi-military patterns of action. That change means the unification of local terrorist networks throughout the Gaza Strip into one military wing with an orderly structure which has adopted military components both in its commanding and directing the forces and support systems (manufacturing, acquiring and smuggling weapons, etc.).

However, it is not a classic military organization, and under fire Hamas can be expected to employ the principles of asymmetric warfare: the operation of small fighting units (platoons and squads), focusing on hit and run attacks, blending in with and disappearing into the civilian population, making extensive use of civilians as human shields, etc.

Hamas’s military wing includes territorial brigades and designated units deployed throughout the Gaza Strip, each of which has more than 1,000 operatives. Each brigade has a number of battalions and each battalion has several companies. Each company has three platoons composed of three combat teams (including fighters, anti-tank operatives, saboteurs, medics).

The brigades are deployed as follows:

1. A brigade in northern sector, commanded by Ahmed Ghandour.
2. The Gaza City sector, which apparently has two brigades commanded by Ahmed Ja’abari.
3. A brigade in the central sector, commanded by Ayman Nawfal (today detained by the Egyptians).
4. A brigade in the southern sector, which apparently has two brigades (in accordance with geographical conditions), one in Khan Yunis, commanded by Muhammad Sinwar, and the other in Rafah, commanded by Ra’ed al–Attar.

Ordinarily, as noted above, the Izz al–Din al–Qassam Brigades have a few hundred skilled operatives. They attack civilian targets in Israel (firing rockets and mortar  shells) and military targets bordering the Gaza Strip (firing mortar shells, light weapons fire, planting IEDs, attempts to carry out mass-killing attacks and abduct soldiers in Israeli territory).

Source: The Hamas Terror Organization – 2007 Update, Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs

You can learn more about Hamas’ military wing here:

• Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades, Janes
• Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades, Yedioth Ahronoth

Khaled Meshal, the Hamas terror chief whom Syria has a given safe haven for years, boasted that Hamas would have “a second, third, and fourth Gilad Shalit” if the Israeli Defense Forces sent ground forces into Gaza.

According to al Jazeera Meshal met with other terror supporters and figureheads in Damascus yesterday, including Saeed Jalili, Iran’s Supreme National Security Council Secretary-General and Ramadan Abdullah Shalah, head of the Islamic Jihad terrorist group.

As this blogger has repeatedly stressed, Iran continues to train, arm, and fund Hamas terror operations. “Iran is our mother,” a senior Hamas guerilla commander told The Sunday Times in March 2008, bragging that “300 of the group’s ‘best brains’ had been secretly sent to Tehran.”