The Hamas paper Al-Risala published an interview with a terrorist on Tuesday, who called for the current wave of Arab terror attacks plaguing Israel to be escalated by poisoning the knives used to stab Jews.

The interviewee, Amar Abu Sarhan, stabbed three Israelis in October 1990 and was jailed until being released in the 2011 Gilad Shalit deal, which saw 1,027 terrorists go free.

Abu Sarhan was praised in the interview as a pioneer of the “knife intifada” of 1990, and he called on young Arabs to follow his example and murder Jews in stabbing attacks.

Describing the advantages of conducting a stabbing attack, he said it is a lone activity that is difficult to thwart, and that it is a more painful way of being murdered than by gunfire.

Significantly, Abu Sarhan suggesting rubbing poison on the blade of the knife before conducting an attack, in a chilling recommendation for future terrorists.

The terrorist’s words bring to mind the troubling phenomenon of poisoned bombs, which Hamas back in 2001 claimed detonating in attacks against Israeli civilians. 

At the time the Israeli Health Ministry revealed that a bomb detonated in an attack in Jerusalem on December 1, 2001 was filled with nails dipped in rat poison.

A police spokesperson was quoted by Associated Press at the time saying that since 1995, traces of chemicals had been found at the site of at least five bombing attacks.

Hamas’s call for poisoned stabbings follow orders by the terror group to launch suicide bombings in Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria in an escalation of the attacks.

Israel on Monday night arrested Sheikh Hassan Yousef, a senior Hamas official in the Judea and Samaria region, in what experts say was a preventative move meant to avoid the suicide bombings.

Gil Ronen contributed to this report.