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

Hamas claimed responsibility for yesterday’s terrorist attack in Jerusalem that wounded 17 people.


According to the Kuwait Times, Hamas’ Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades claimed responsibility for the attack by a Palestinian who drove his BMW into a crowd at Tzahal Square near the Jaffa Gate in the Old City.

Col. Moshe Elad (res.) recently warned that Israeli defense officials must be better prepared for unconventional terrorist attacks.

In the calculated cruelty that is Hamas, the English-language web site operated by the radical Islamic terrorist group’s “military arm” set up a horrific poll concerning the fate of kidnapped Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit.


Using web-savvy marketing tactics — replete with English typos — Hamas’ Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades put a poll on their website asking visitors to guess the fate of Gilad Shalit, more than two years after he was kidnapped from inside Israel by Palestinian terrorists and brought back to Gaza.

The poll asks users to vote on what the “Faith [sic] of Shalit will be”:

The terrorist minds inside Hamas show their true colors, asking whether Shalit’s fate will be like Ron Arad, whether he will be part of a successful prisoner swap, or whether he will die.

The fact that Hamas appears to have posted this sick poll just after Sunday Times reporter Christine Toomey’s account investigating Gilad Shalit’s well-being and whereabouts in Gaza seems less than coincidental.

Toomey spoke with Mahmoud Zahar, a Hamas co-founder and right-hand man to Hamas’ Ismail Haniyeh in Gaza; and Ahmed Yousef, another Hamas top political advisor; and to an unnamed member of the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades, Hamas’ military wing, suggests that Hamas opted to continue it’s disgusting position of playing games with Gilad Shalit’s family, the Israeli public, and all those who oppose terror.

Christine Toomey, a reporter for the Sunday Times, went to Gaza to ask competing Palestinian terrorist groups and clans an important question: where is kidnapped IDF soldier Gilad Shalit?


She didn’t receive any clear answers.

Three competing groups originally claimed responsibility for kidnapping the 19-year-old Israeli soldier from inside Israel and taking him back into Gaza:

• Hamas, via the terrorist group’s military wing, the al-Qassam Brigades;
• The Popular Resistance Committees, a loose amalgam of Hamas, Fatah and Islamic Jihad terror factions, and;
• The Army of Islam, a previously unknown group claiming links to al Qaeda.

She met with Mahmoud Zahar, a co-founder of Hamas whom she called “a militant hardliner..the real power behind the Hamas prime minister, Ismail Haniyeh, and the one person who might be expected to deliver answers about Shalit.”

Zahar claims to know nothing about Shalit’s whereabouts. “Nobody from the political or military wing of Hamas knows where Shalit is,” he alleged, “only the small group who kidnapped him know. They are very secretive.”

Next on Toomey’s list is Ahmed Yousef (inset, right), a Hamas top political adviser. Swtiching from talking about his job as a consultant to Tom Clancy, Yousef spouts conspiracy theories that he claims make people refuse to talk about Shalit.  Israel “can smell what we’re eating,” he spins, “so nobody will talk about Shalit. It puts them in great danger if they do.”

Next Toomey goes to Gaza’s Doghmush clan, leaders of a sophisticated crime syndicate and strong-arm force that was “happy to brag about how well [Gilad] is being treated.”

51-year-old Abu Khatab Doghmush pointed the finder at Hamas, saying that “the only faction that controls his life now is the Qassam Brigades.” But for someone who claims to know nothing about Shalit’s whereabouts, Doghmush oddly claimed to know a lot, alleging “that Shalit is living in a paradise.”

To bolster this incredible allegation, Doghmush claims intimate knowledge of Shalit’s treatment: alleging that “every year a party is held to celebrate his birthday. Yes, there is a cake and candles, music, everything.”

Toomey then travels to Rafah, Gaza’s notoriously porous bordertown alongside Egypt, where she tries to talk with heavily armed members of Hamas’ Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades, but they refer her back to Hamas leaders like Mahmoud Zahar.

Toomey speaks with 24-year-old Abu Mujahed, spokesman for the Popular Resistance Committees, a group which claims to have coordinated kidnapping Gilad Shalit form inside Israel. But when asked where he is, and how he is being treated, the PRC hack “repeats the mantra that he is being treated well, “according to our religion”. Only a small group know where Shalit is held, he claims, and they communicate by means of dead letter drops, mobile phones being too easy to track.”

Talking with parents of two Gaza terrorist killed by IDF soldiers during the capture of Shalit don’t reveal anything about Shalit’s whereabouts.