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The Hamas most wanted cards are decks of playing cards featuring pictures of Hamas members wanted by the State of Israel. The decks were produced by independent volunteers and were handed out to Israel Defense Forces soldiers during the early stages of the Israel–Hamas war.

Unofficial IDF deck

As part of the Israel–Hamas war, an unofficial card deck of 54 wanted individuals were distributed to Israeli soldiers. The idea for the deck was inspired by the most-wanted Iraqi playing cards created by the Defense Intelligence Agency for identifying the top wanted members of Saddam Hussein's government during the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The history of making such cards dates back to the American Civil War.

More than 10,000 decks of the cards were distributed to Israeli soldiers to help the soldiers identify top Hamas targets and to unsettle Hamas officials. The hierarchy of various Hamas officials have been mixed around in the deck in order to attempt to embarrass more higher-ranking officials.

As of October 2024, 31 individuals from the list had been killed.

List of cards

Christian cowboy deck

A group of Christian Zionist "cowboys" who had come to volunteer on farms in Israel, and settler farms in the occupied West Bank, after the 2023 Hamas-led attack on Israel, designed and printed another unofficial deck of playing cards with photos of the most wanted Hamas personalities and distributed the cards to Israeli soldiers in southern Israel and Gaza. The cards were designed and printed at Be'eri Printers at Kibbutz Be'eri, one of the hardest hit kibbutzim during the October 7 attack.

The deck was printed in Hebrew, English, and Arabic, and included two joker cards and 12 Hamas personalities, including Ismail Haniyeh, Yahya Sinwar, Abu Obaida, Mohammed Deif, Issa, al-Arouri, Mashal, Hamad, Sa'ad, Muhammad Sinwar. The depictions in these cards, from the drawings of the subjects to how their names were written in Arabic, are intended to mock the Hamas leaders. For example, Yahya Sinwar is written as "Sinfar", a play on the Arabic word for mouse, الْفَأْر al-faʔr, and his picture depicts him as a mouse. But most of the cowboys in the group the men seem to be a part of are English-speaking white men from the United States, not Arab Christians.

The "cowboys" came to Israel and Palestine with an Evangelical organization organization called HaYovel Volunteering. The organization is based in Patterson, Missouri, and particularly focused on recruiting volunteers to do farm work in Israeli settlements in the West Bank region of Palestine, while the usual farmers are fighting for the IDF in Gaza. The volunteers and the Hoyovel organisation refer to the West Bank region of Palestine as "Judea and Samaria" (the same name the Israeli settlers use) or as "the biblical heartland".

They HoYovel organization had previously been involved in a West Bank "land grab" in 2022.

References

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