Defense officials in numerous countries, for operational reasons and to comply with international laws of war, take pains to locate their military assets away from their civilians and to maximize protection for the latter. Hamas officials do the opposite. As United Nations officials and others have disapprovingly noted, Hamas stores ammunition in schools, puts missile launchers adjacent to mosques, sets up command centers in hospitals, and generally bases its operations in densely populated civilian neighborhoods.

This is not simply a human-shield strategy, where the aim is to deter an attack by using innocent lives as a barrier. Hamas is doing something far more insidious: it’s ensuring the mass death of Palestinians. …

While some of Hamas’s most brutal tactics, like systematic rape and beheading captives, are long-practiced atrocities for which the armies of Stalin, Hitler, and Genghis Khan are infamous, it is unprecedented for a party to adopt a war strategy to maximize civilian deaths on its own side. This is so strange and evil that it should appall any decent person. Contrary to conventional commentary, this is not a human shield strategy. It’s a human sacrifice strategy.

[Feith is smart enough to know that this is nothing new. The only thing new about this is the willingness of the mainstream media to acknowledge it. And that may only be temporary; we are already hearing the nonsense about Israel’s need to reduce civilian casualties when they aren’t the ones using civilians as human shields and dead bodies for propaganda. — Ed]