Last summer, Hamas sent texts to Israeli civilians saying that they were legal targets:
Your government claimed yesterday that it stopped the battle, but without our consent and meeting our conditions - and it thought we were rash enough to [agree to a] cease-fire. On the contrary, we hurried to strike anywhere in Israel - from Dimona to Haifa - and we made you hide in shelters like mice. . .Correct me if I'm wrong, but "all of Israel" includes significant numbers of women and children. (And Arabs.)
Again, we warn you - if your government does not agree to all of our conditions, then all of Israel will legally remain open to our weapons fire.
They don't have binoculars powerful enough to see where they are shooting their rockets, but they know quite well that they are aiming at cities and civilian targets, as the Qassam Brigades wrote at the time:
The city of Tel Aviv which is the head of the economy, and the Zionist Ben Gurion airport, has become a strategic goal for the Qassam rockets.Aren't there some kids in Tel Aviv?
Last summer, Hamas official Fawzi Barhoum exhorted Israeli Arabs to kill any Jews they can find:
Let me say, loud and clear, to our people in the West Bank: Don't you have cars? Don't you have motorcycles? Don't you have knives? Don't you have clubs? Don't you have bulldozers? Don't you have trucks? Anyone who has a knife, a club, a weapon, or a car, yet does not use it to run over a Jew or a settler, and does not use it to kill dozens of Zionists, does not belong to Palestine.
Last November, the Qassam Brigades published a list of their achievements. The very first one they mention was the murder of a "rabbi" who lived in Gaza. Not a soldier, but a bearded farmer that they happily brag about killing because he is assumed to be not only Jewish but also a rabbi.
Yet Hamas knows one thing well. Clueless Westerners don't automatically assume that the words that come out of the mouths of even proud murderers are necessarily untrue. And as they learned from their ideological predecessors, if you repeat a lie often enough...