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Gaza Schoolchildren Receive Military Training From Hamas

The Hamas government in Gaza has begun a program to provide military training for boys, and soon for girls, to prepare them for any future confrontation with Israel, writes Hazem Balousha.
A member of Hamas security forces gives instructions to Palestinian students during a military-style exercise at the courtyard of a high school in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip March 6, 2013. The military-style exercise in the 138 Hamas-run high schools in Gaza was part of a program sanctioned by the Hamas Islamist government to teach students how to use guns. Education officials in Gaza say some 6,000 students have joined the training initiative where only boys can sign up for the voluntary progra
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Inside the courtyard of the Gamal Abdel Nasser School in the Shajaiyah neighborhood east of Gaza City, students carrying Kalashnikov assault rifles and dressed in military fatigues take their positions for a demonstration — an attack on an Israeli military site represented by a makeshift watchtower flying the Israeli flag. A YouTube video shows a segment of the demonstration in which one of the boys hits the tower inside the school with an artillery shell to cheers of encouragement and cries of “Allahu akbar.”

The demonstration is part of a military training program for students that the Hamas Ministry of Education has been running since the beginning of the school year in Gaza. The program is a project to train 5,000 students, aged 15–17 from 65 schools, under the supervision of national security officers from the Ministry of Interior and the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas.

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