EQUAL OPPORTUNITY MURDER

Hamas women’s wing takes up weapons ‘for the love of jihad’.

They wear the long skirts and head coverings of modest Muslim women, but their draped robes are camouflage khaki and their scarves the distinctive lime green colour of the Palestinian militant group, Hamas.  Their shoulders bear the weight not of bags or babies carried by their more traditional peers, but rifles and rocket-propelled grenades.  This is Hamas’s armed women’s wing, newly formed in the Gaza Strip and trained to use explosives and light arms for the “love of jihad”. “We joined with only one single aim: jihad and resistance,” a veiled spokeswoman told the official Hamas newspaper, Al Risala, as the troop paraded at a secret location in the territory recently re-occupied after Israel’s disengagement.