A newly released video clip from the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) shows footage from a youth camp organized by the Izz Al-Din Al-Qassam Brigades, Hamas’s so-called “military wing”. The video shows young cadets demonstrating military skills, such as use of weapons, and simulating the kidnapping of an Israeli soldier. MEMRI’s clip was put together using footage from Hamas’s Al-Aqsa TV and from various Internet channels. In the clip, Hamas leader Mahmoud Al-Zahar is seen encouraging the youths to use the weapons in their hands in the “war for the liberation of Palestine”. “They have embraced the verse: ‘Kill them wherever you may find them,’ and they have abandoned the slogans about the 1967 borders, the 1948 borders, the Oslo borders, and the Camp David borders… They have fought, they are fighting, and they are preparing themselves for all of Palestine,” he says. A clip released by MEMRI last year shows a televised graduation ceremony for a similar Hamas youth camp in Gaza. At the ceremony, suicide terror attacks against the “Zionist enemy” were glorified by Hamas officials. Hamas has previously released a cartoon honoring its “military wing,” and last year began a program to teach “resistance” to Israel in Gaza’s public school system. In a previous video exposed by MEMRI, principals in Gaza schools and Hamas officials defended the paramilitary training that children are forced to undergo in schools as “chivalry” class and “sports training.”
