This Israeli war crime is beyond depraved

"Every accusation is a confession"

This is so depraved, so evil, that it is difficult to know where to even begin.

A phrase that has often been rightly applied to the Israeli state goes like this: “Every accusation is a confession.”

And this story, which in fact emerged in the Israeli media, could not offer that phrase more hideous weight.

It’s a story which first appeared in an Israeli investigative outlet called The Hottest Place In Hell, and is based on testimonies from Israeli soldiers themselves.

That’s in Hebrew, but the Israeli-Palestinian outlet +972 magazine has helpfully written out in English what the report details. The open paragraph offers up the key facts:

A senior officer in the Israeli army’s Nahal Brigade tied an explosive cord around the neck of an 80-year-old Palestinian man and forced him to serve as a human shield, ordering him to scout out abandoned houses under threat of having his head blown off. After he had served his purpose, the soldiers ordered the man to flee with his wife, but upon being spotted by another battalion they were both shot dead on the spot.

This was last May in Zeitoun, a neighbourhood in Gaza City, which is the north of the Strip, which has been subjected to the worst military devastation. The Israeli soldiers were conducting a sweep of houses there and then encountered an elderly couple who told the soldiers that they could not evacuate because of their mobility issues, which compelled the man to use a cane. Their children had already fled.

According to one of the Israeli soldiers quoted: “At that stage, the commander decided to use them as ‘mosquitoes”.

A mosquito is a euphemism for a human shield. The Israeli military forces Palestinian civilians to protect soldiers from, say, being blown apart.

The woman was then detained in their home, but the man - again, only able to walk with the help of his cane - was sent from house to house, scouting for bombs or militants on their behalf.

An Israeli soldier is quoted as explaining:

“He entered each house before us so that if there were [explosives] or a militant inside, he would [take the hit] instead of us.”

This is already depraved behaviour, an intolerable war crime. But listen to this detail. Before the coerced sweep began, one of the officers took a detonation cord - that is, an explosive fuse which is used to connect charges and explosives, and then, according to +972 magazine, “attached it to an initiating charge, and tied around the elderly man’s neck so” - in the words of a soldier

“he wouldn’t run away, even though he was walking with a cane. He was told that if he did anything wrong or didn’t follow orders, the soldier behind him would pull the cord, and his head would be torn from his body.”

This went on for 8 hours. The soldiers then brought this elderly man back to his home, then ordered him to flee along with his wife by foot to the so-called humanitarian zone in southern Gaza.

Crucially, the soldiers did not inform nearby soldiers that an elderly couple was about to cross through the area. According to the soldier:

“After 100 meters, the other battalion saw them and immediately shot them. They died like that, in the street.”

The Israeli investigative outlet The Hottest Place in Hell further relays testimonies from soldiers about the army’s open fire regulations, which state that any Palestinian - whoever they are - found moving in a combat area after the designated ‘evacuation time’ has passed is considered an enemy combatant. So this elderly couple were automatically considered enemy combatants by Israeli soldiers, and immediately killed.

+972 Magazine state this practise is denied by the IDF, but this is rightly given short shrift.

It’s just worth for a minute pausing to reflect on this horror. A man who is at least 80 years old was born in 1946 or 1945, or earlier. This man, as a small child, would have survived the Nakba, the violent expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their home as Israel was founded, in which around 15,000 Palestinians were killed and 531 Palestinians towns and villages were destroyed. Statistically he is likely to have been a child refugee whose family fled the Nakba, because the vast majority of Gaza’s population are the families of those driven out of what is now Israel.

He will have survived the 1967 war, when Israel seized Gaza and the West Bank. He will have survived decades of occupation. He survived the siege of Gaza, the longest siege of our age. He survived multiple brutal Israeli onslaughts in Gaza.

He survived all of that, and his last moments on earth - this frail elderly man with poor mobility - were Israeli soldiers tying a detonation cord around his neck to force him to be a human shield: where he was used to go from house to house to check for unexploded devices, each time not knowing if he was to blown up by such a device, with the threat of the Israeli soldiers blowing his head off with an explosive cord if he didn’t comply.

And after hours and hours of that unimaginable terror, he was told to flee alongside his wife, presumably who he’d been married to for many decades, and gone through so much together, knowing what their likely fate would be, before they were finally gunned down together in the streets.

I resent having to play this sordid game, which is based on the total dehumanisation of Palestinians, in which their lives are stripped of all meaning and worth, but imagine Hamas militants had done this to an elderly Israeli couple in their 80s.

That atrocity alone would be deemed as conclusive evidence of Hamas’ utter depravity, its evil. Indeed it would be offered up as proof of Hamas perpetrating some of the worst evil that humanity is capable.

But that is not said about the Israeli state and its armed forces. Instead, Western governments continue to arm a military committing these obscenities, and our media outlets overwhelmingly continue to cheerlead and whitewash what this military is doing.

Which brings us back to ‘every accusation is a confession.’

Last August, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz published an investigation headlined Israeli Army Uses Palestinian Civilians to Inspect Potentially Booby-trapped Tunnels in Gaza’

The investigation stated:

Random Palestinians have been used by Israeli army units in the Gaza Strip for one purpose: to serve as human shields for soldiers during operations.

It went on, referring to the term used by Israeli soldiers for these human shields - shawsihim:

"Our lives are more important than their lives," soldiers were told. The thinking is that it's better for the Israeli soldiers to remain alive and for the shawishim to be the ones blown up by an explosive device.

Other newspaper outlets which are otherwise overwhelmingly biased towards Israel have similarly reported on this crime.

Last October, the New York Times published a report headlined: “How Israel’s Army Uses Palestinians as Human Shields in Gaza”

The subheading gives you the gist:

Israeli soldiers and Palestinian former detainees say troops have regularly forced captured Gazans to carry out life-threatening tasks, including inside Hamas tunnels.

The same month, CNN also published a story headlined ‘The Israeli military has used Palestinians as human shields in Gaza, soldier and former detainees say’.

The next month, the Washington Post published an article with the headline “Israeli forces used civilians as human shields in Gaza, Palestinians and soldiers say”.

There has always been some examples of good journalism exposing Israeli war crimes in the Western media. The problem is they are ‘orphaned’: that is, they do not shift the overall narrative. Despite the overwhelming, incontrovertible evidence about Israel’s use of human shields, it is not deemed an incontestable, objective fact: few will know anything of it.

And yet overwhelmingly the whole narrative about human shields has focused on claims that Hamas use them. Here is a narrative used to justify wiping Gaza from the face of the earth and the mass slaughter of civilians: that is, all of this death and destruction is caused because civilians are placed in harms way.

Strikingly, the definition of human shield is completely different. It’s referring to military targets being in close proximity to civilian areas. This is an unhinged nonsense - Gaza is one of the most densely populated lands on earth, and, say, Mossad and IDF headquarters are also located slap bang in the middle of civilian areas.

It is entirely right to hold Hamas to account for war crimes committed against Israeli civilians. The evidence for the use of human shields, though, simply is not there.

In the 2009 Israeli onslaught on Gaza, Human Rights Watch wrote:

In the killings documented in this report, Human Rights Watch found no evidence that the civilian victims were used by Palestinian fighters as human shields or were shot in the crossfire between opposing forces. In each of the incidents, Israeli forces appeared in control, and Palestinian fighters had left the area in question. The civilian victims were in plain view and posed no apparent security threat.

In the 2014 Israeli onslaught on Gaza, Amnesty wrote that it

does not have evidence at this point that Palestinian civilians have been intentionally used by Hamas or Palestinian armed groups during the current hostilities to “shield” specific locations or military personnel or equipment from Israeli attacks

In that 2014 onslaught, the BBC’s Jeremy Bowen wrote:

I saw no evidence during my week in Gaza of Israel’s accusation that Hamas uses Palestinians as human shields.

According to Israeli human rights organisation Btselem, since the the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza began in 1967, Israeli forces have repeatedly used Palestinians as human shields.

The Israeli state has tried to justify genocide by using the whole trope of human shields, while at the same time actually using Palestinian civilians as human shields, including elderly frail Palestinians who can barely walk, who are then shot alongside their elderly lovers.

Well, as I keep saying, for those who have legitimised and cheered on Israel’s genocide - no excuses, nowhere to hide. You cannot claim you did not know what the Israeli state was doing to the Palestinian people. No crime has been so confessed to by its perpetrators as it happened, no crime has been so evidenced by its own victims as it happened.

And we owe it to that elderly Palestinian man and his elderly wife to fight to get them justice, just as we owe it to all Palestinians to get justice.