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.”

Northern Gaza’s Holfe Mosque was struck by Israel’s Air Force early Friday morning because of its reported multi-purpose use by Hamas to launch rockets into Israel, facilitate meetings by the terrorist group’s members, and house arms and communication equipment for the radical Islamist group’s terror attacks.


The Holfe Mosque is located inside the U.N.-operated Jabalyah a/k/a Jabalia camp just a few kilometers from Israel:


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On Wednesday, Dec. 31, 2008, the IAF struck a different mosque in Gaza City reportedly used by Hamas as a Grad missile and Qassam rocket launch site, staging ground, and storage area.

This is a classic example of Hamas repeatedly using civilian population centers as human shields. Recently slain Hamas terror leader Nizar Rayan a/k/a Rayyan was an open proponent of hiding the group’s terrorists amidst civilian human shields inside Gaza.

The video below taken by an IAF drone shows a 2007 attack in progress when terrorists launched rockets from a U.N.-operated school in Beit Hanoun, Gaza. U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon deplored the attack, calling it a an “abuse of UN facilities, which is a serious violation of the UN’s privileges and immunities…[and the type of] actions that endanger the lives of civilians, especially children.”

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 kamagra from canada.

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.”