‘A full-blown war crime’: Israel condemned for new footage of human shields

A human rights activist on Monday condemned recent video evidence of Israel using Palestinians as “human shields” in combat, calling it “appalling but not surprising.” Activists stressed that the Israel Defense Forces have long used civilians in Palestine to protect their own soldiers when bombing Gaza and the West Bank.

Footage released by Al-Jazeera On Sunday evening, Israeli forces were seen fitting body cameras to arrested Palestinians, dressing them in Israeli uniforms and sending them into buildings and tunnels to ensure no explosives had been planted there.

The footage provided “evidence of systematic army tactics,” said the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor.

“The leaked gruesome scenes obtained and published by Al-Jazeera reveal how the Israeli army uses civilians, including injured prisoners, as human shields, forcing them into dangerous combat zones after attaching cameras to their bodies and tying them with ropes,” Euro-Med said. “Each of the above criminal, brutal and inhumane acts constitutes a grave violation of the rules of international humanitarian law and is a full-blown war crime. These crimes and dozens of similar cases require urgent intervention by the international justice system to ensure the protection of civilians, prevent their use as human shields and arrest the Israeli political and military perpetrators.”

The Israeli government has long blamed Hamas’ use of “human shields” for the number of deaths in the Gaza Strip. The death toll now stands at at least 37,900. The group operates from civilian infrastructure and puts Palestinians in danger.

Journalist Dan Cohen pointed out that for decades the Israeli military has used the so-called “neighborhood procedure,” in which Palestinian “messengers” are forced to approach the homes of suspected refugees alone and unarmed while Israeli soldiers announce over loudspeakers that they are surrounding the building.

The procedure is “so commonplace that the military has tried to justify it as a life-saving measure that has been used since the 1980s,” Cohen said. “The images … show the reality of this criminal practice.”

In its statement on the new images, Euro-Med listed numerous cases in which Israel appears to have used human shields in accordance with the Geneva Conventions: “cases in which persons were actually brought to military targets in order to protect these targets from attack.”

As Euro-Med reported:

During the raid on Shifa Medical Complex in March 2024, Israeli forces used civilians, including patients and displaced persons seeking shelter in the complex, as human shields. To protect their military operations in the hospital and its surroundings, Israeli forces exploited Palestinian civilians by having them form human barriers to surround Israeli soldiers and military vehicles, or sending them under threats into homes and buildings to either assist in the arrest or forcible evacuation of other civilians before the army conducted raids, and many of these buildings were subsequently destroyed.

(…)

In addition, several families living near the Shifa health complex reported that Israeli security forces arrested young men at the medical facility and then used them to enter the families’ homes and demand their immediate evacuation to the central and southern Gaza Strip.

The group also pointed to a recent example on June 22 in the Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank, where Israeli forces put a wounded Palestinian on the hood of a military vehicle and drove him through the Jabariya neighborhood, and to “a complex and comprehensive crime” against a civilian family on June 27 in Gaza City.

“A family consisting of an elderly woman and her four children, including three young women and a one-and-a-half-year-old granddaughter, were attacked with gunfire and bombs by Israeli forces who stormed their home in the Gaza neighborhood of Al-Shujaiya,” the group said. “They were later taken outside and held near Israeli tanks in a dangerous combat zone for over three hours, despite the injuries they sustained in the initial attack on their home, and were used as human shields. The 65-year-old mother, identified as Safiya Hassan Musa Al-Jamal, was run over by an Israeli tank and killed in front of her son.”

On Monday, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) condemned the footage of the incident in the Gaza Strip released on Sunday, while pointing out that Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir was filmed over the weekend calling for the execution of Palestinian prisoners and the distribution of reduced food rations to them as a “deterrence tactic.”

Nearly 10,000 Palestinians, including women and children, have been arrested by Israeli security forces, CAIR said, calling on the US to end its military support for Israel.

“Israeli war crimes and calls for more war crimes occur daily in Gaza and the West Bank, while the Biden administration sends more American bombs to Israel to complete the genocide,” said CAIR Communications Director Ibrahim Hooper. “The U.S.-Israeli partnership in genocide, ethnic cleansing and forced starvation will shape the international community’s image of America for generations to come. The Biden administration must change course to uphold universal human rights and recognize the humanity of the Palestinians.”