Israel's Use of Human Shields in Gaza Sparks Calls for US Probe

The Israel Defense Forces' use of Palestinians—who are often handcuffed and forced to wear IDF uniforms—as human shields prompted the leading U.S. Muslim advocacy group on Monday to call on the Biden administration to investigate what experts say is a war crime by the No. 1 recipient of American military aid.

International law prohibits the use of combatants or civilians as human shields. However, numerous reports have emerged during Israel's yearlong assault on Gaza—which has left more than 152,000 Palestinians dead, wounded, or missing and is the subject of an International Criminal Court genocide case led by South Africa—of IDF troops forcing captured Palestinians, including children, to protect Israeli forces in life-threatening situations.

"The State Department and the Department of Justice must investigate these credible charges of widespread and systematic human rights abuses by military forces that receive weapons paid for by American taxpayers and used against a civilian population," Nihad Awad, the national executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said in a statement.

"These abuses, and the obvious and open ethnic cleansing of Gaza, violate our nation's laws," Awad added. "The Biden administration's complicity with this genocide stains our national reputation and will haunt our diplomats for generations to come when they are told to 'remember Gaza' whenever they bring up the subject of human rights."

International media outlets including Al Jazeera, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, Britain's The Guardian, and The New York Times have reported how Israel uses abducted Palestinian militants and civilians to proceed ahead of IDF troops in underground tunnels and buildings in order to protect their captors during life-threatening missions.

In May, a report published by Defense for Children International-Palestine revealed that Palestinian minors are forced to walk ahead of IDF soldiers during dangerous raids. Subsequent Al Jazeera reports of a Palestinian strapped to the hood of an Israeli combat vehicle to deter attack and Gazans being sent into buildings and tunnels to ensure the locations weren't rigged with explosives sparked international outrage and initial IDF denials.

"It's hard to recognize them. They're usually wearing Israeli army uniforms, many of them are in their 20s, and they're always with Israeli soldiers of various ranks," Haaretzreported in August. But upon closer examination, "you see that most of them are wearing sneakers, not army boots. And their hands are cuffed behind their backs and their faces are full of fear."

According to an Al Jazeeraarticle published Sunday:

By dressing Palestinian civilians in Israeli military uniforms and casting them as combatants the Israeli military purposefully conceals their vulnerability. It deploys them as shields not to deter Palestinian fighters from striking Israeli soldiers, but rather to draw their fire and thus reveal their location, allowing the Israeli troops to launch a counterattack and kill the fighters. The moment these human shields, masked as soldiers, are sent into the tunnels, they are transformed from vulnerable civilians into fodder.

One 35-year-old Palestinian man, who declined to be identified by his real name for fear of his life, told The Guardian that "the Israeli soldiers put a GPS tracker on my hand and told me: 'If you try to run away, we will shoot you. We will know where you are.'"

"I was asked to go to knock on the doors of four houses and two schools and ask people to leave—women and children first and then the men," he added. "At one of the schools, the situation was very dangerous. I shouted to everyone in the school to leave quietly, but at that moment there was heavy shooting by the Israeli army and I thought I was going to die."

Former IDF soldiers told The New York Times that IDF commanders instructed them that "the lives of terrorists were worth less than those of Israelis—even though officers often concluded their detainees did not belong to terrorist groups and later released them without charge."

Israel denies it uses Palestinian civilians as human shields, despite video evidence of IDF troops doing so in both Gaza and the illegally occupied West Bank.

"The orders and directives of the IDF prohibit the use of Gazan civilians captured in the field for military missions that endanger them," the IDF said in August. "The protocols and orders have been clarified to the troops on the ground."

However, IDF troops have confirmed the practice.

"From what we understand it was a very widely used protocol, meaning there are hundreds of Palestinians in Gaza who have been used as human shields," former IDF sniper Nadav Weiman, who is now a director at Breaking the Silence, an Israeli veterans' group that exposes war crimes, toldThe Guardian.

"Palestinians are being grabbed from humanitarian corridors inside Gaza... and then they're being brought to different units inside Gaza—regular infantry units, not special forces," Weiman said. "And then those Palestinians are being used as human shields to sweep tunnels and also houses. In some cases, they have a GoPro camera on their chest or on their head and in almost all of the cases, they are cuffed before they are taken into a tunnel or house to sweep and they are dressed in IDF uniform."

The Biden administration provides Israel with tens of billions of dollars in military aid and shields its ally from international accountability by wielding its United Nations Security Council veto power to block cease-fire resolutions. Administration spokespeople have deflected questions about the IDF's use of human shields by deferring to Israeli investigations in which perpetrators are rarely punished.

In 2002, the Israeli High Court of Justice issued a temporary injunction prohibiting the use of human shields in operations to quash the Second Intifada, or general uprising. Some IDF soldiers ignored the injunction, according to the Israeli human rights group B'Tselem.

In 2010, two staff sergeants in the Givati Brigade were convicted of forcing a 9-year-old Palestinian boy to open bags they thought might contain explosives during the 2008-09 Operation Cast Lead invasion of Gaza. The staff sergeants were slapped on the wrists with suspended sentences and demotions. Neither went to prison.

Michael Schmitt, a professor of international humanitarian law at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, New York, toldThe New York Times last week that "in most cases," what Israel is accused of "constitutes a war crime."