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.