S. K.

Israel has been systematically using human shields in this conflict. The evidence has become too great to ignore. Let's recap what has come to light so far. In January, The Times of Israel reported that "A Palestinian shop owner said Israeli troops used him as a human shield to protect themselves during a raid on the town of Dura in the West Bank yesterday.  Cellphone footage showed Baha Abu Ras being marched up a street by a soldier who guided him from behind with one hand and kept a rifle resting on his shoulder with the other. Two Israeli soldiers advanced carefully behind them, their rifles raised. Abu Ras said he had been taken from his cellphone shop in Dura, near the city of Hebron, after Israeli soldiers searched the premises during a raid in which Palestinian officials said two Palestinians were shot dead." That month, Mondoweiss reported that the IDF went into the apartment of a Palestinian family in Khan Younis and took 26 year old Ahmad Safi with them. "The next morning on January 23, the Israeli soldiers ordered Ahmad, his father, his brother, and the rest of his cousins to move outdoors and instructed them to move horizontally in front of the armored military cars.“As they ordered us to stop and stand still, I found myself again a few meters away from the resistance military base,” Ahmad said. “ That was the moment I realized that we were being used as human shields.” "Moments later, an intensified exchange if gunfire broke out while Ahmad and his family were in between the Israeli soldiers and the resistance fighters, with no shelter. They stretched their bodies on the ground, in a helpless attempt to take cover. “We kept screaming in Arabic, ‘stop shooting,’ and a few moments later the shooting stopped,” Ammar, another one of Ahmad’s cousins, told Mondoweiss. They were forced to remain there for over 12 hours, conscripted by the Israeli soldiers as unwilling human shields. By the end of it, they were dehydrated and could barely stand on their feet. Soldiers forced them to kneel in the middle of the street as they took cover behind Ahmad and his male relatives. In May, the Washington Post reported that Israel had taken a 39 year old man out of his home at night. He was found shot after the IDF withdrew. " The family found Rajai’s body hours later, after the soldiers had withdrawn. They suspect soldiers used him as a human shield to confront militants in a downstairs apartment and then shot him, a claim the Israeli military denies." In June, AP reported that the IDF had a 24-year-old strapped to the jeep circulated on social media, sparking widespread condemnation, including from the United States. Many said it showed that Israeli soldiers were using him as a human shield. The army admitted that he was not a suspect of any terrorist activity. First he had been shot by the IDF before being tied. The State Department confirmed that this had happened and stated, " Civilians should never be used as human shields. The IDF should swiftly investigate what happened and hold people accountable." In August, One soldier told Haaretz "that the IDF has been using Palestinian civilians as human shields during operations in Gaza, ordering them to go into tunnels and homes that the army fears may be booby-trapped.“It is better that they explode and not the soldiers,” one of the soldiers speaking to Haaretz recalls being told by his commander who justified the practice. Haaretz says the IDF has not been using terror suspects but rather innocent civilians who it detains specifically for this practice. According to the report, "The Palestinian men are told that they’ll be released after completing one “mission,” another soldier recounted. He said that the Palestinians were kept with the troops for varying lengths of time, ranging from one or two days to a week. The newspaper alleged this practice has been widely employed across the Gaza Strip in recent months, and that senior IDF staff — including Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi —  were aware. The IDF knows “that it’s not a one-time incident of a young and stupid commander who decides to take someone of his own accord,” one of the soldiers said. One soldier said he was charged with guarding a 16-year-old Palestinian teenager ahead of the mission he’d been selected for. “You keep quiet and try to convince yourself, ‘ok, let’s go, let’s use them,'” the soldier said. “They tried to explain it in a rational way, but at the end of the day, you have a 16-year-old boy sitting inside the house handcuffed, with his eyes covered.” The practice is illegal according to international law, and in 2005, Israel’s Supreme Court ordered the military to stop using Palestinians as human shields. Yet the practice endures. There are many other such cases. This must stop.