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.

Nizar Rayan, a senior Hamas military commander was successfully eliminated by the IDF today.

A proponent of using civilian human shields to protect wanted Hamas members, on November 19, 2006, Hamas’ Rayan promised on Palestinian TV that the terrorist group would use “the bodies and souls” of [Palestinian] civilians to protect the houses of terrorists (he called them “jihad fighters”).

Rayan was a senior political-military liaison for Hamas.

According to Haaretz, an Israeli newspaper, IDF officials confirmed that:

[A] one-ton bomb was used to attack Rayan’s home, and that weapons stored inside set off secondary explosions. Eleven other people, including two of Rayan’s four wives and four of his 12 children, also died, Palestinian health officials said.

Rayan purportedly helped train and mold Hamas suicide bombers. Picture (below) show him emerging from, and standing by what appear to be heavily fortified Hamas tunnels in Gaza — the same tunnels that Hamas tries to persuade public opinion into thinking that they are used solely to smuggle food and medicine into Gaza, while in reality, their existence is overseen by Hamas and used to smuggle in sophisticated military equipment like long-range Grad missiles used to target Israeli cities from inside Gaza.

In May, the respected London-based Arab newspaper Asharq Alawsat reported on a high-level meeting between Iran’s and Hamas figurehead Khaled Meshaal. The alarming report stated that Iranian Brigadier General Ahmad Wahid — a key leader of the country’s missile program — promised Meshal that Iran would “provide very advanced missiles that are currently being produced at the Martyr Bakiri Complex in Tehran especially for Hamas.”