“In several cases, the Military Police Criminal Investigation Division opened investigations after reasonable suspicion arose regarding the use of Palestinians for military missions during the operations,” CNN reported the IDF as saying.
Of course, it is highly unlikely that any proceedings will result from the investigations, but the timing illustrates how Israel gets away with a multitude of violations, including genocide. If the genocidal actions are categorised, attention will shift from the collective violence to the details which Israel deems appropriate to release to mainstream media. This is not the first time that Israel has broadened its violent parameters by selecting some violations to investigate over others.
Context, however, is important.
As such, the IDF’s abuse of Palestinians as human shields must be linked to Israel’s settler-colonial violence and genocide.
READ: ICJ to hold public hearings on Israel’s obligations in occupied Palestinian territory
In its 2017 report on human shields, the Israeli human rights organisation B’Tselem noted that since the Second Intifada, the “use of Palestinians as human shields became open military policy.” The B’Tselem report also noted that no soldiers were prosecuted for using Palestinians as human shields during the 2014 Operation Protective Edge in Gaza.
Yet, part of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s campaign for genocide rested on Hamas purportedly using Palestinians as human shields. Relying on Gaza’s enclosed territory, Netanyahu accused Hamas of hiding amid the civilian population, thus rendering all Palestinians as human shields and allowing the IDF to justify its targeting of civilian infrastructure, including hospitals and places of worship, mosques and churches alike.
Last year, Israeli soldiers spoke to CNN about using Palestinians as human shields. A soldier who questioned the practice was told by his commander, “It’s better that the Palestinian will explode and not our soldiers.” CNN’s report was of course contradicted by the IDF within the article itself, with a statement that purportedly illustrated the military’s prohibition of using “detained Gaza civilians for military operations.”
What better way for Israel to evade further scrutiny over genocide than to break down genocide into manageable and normalised chunks of violations? The actions of a few, as Israel’s narrative would lead the world to believe, shifts attention away from admissions of widespread practice of using Palestinians as human shields.
Israel is certainly not alone in doing this.
Throughout the genocide and even before, the international community diligently broke down Israel’s war crimes and international law violations into isolated incidents, thus ensuring that while world leaders could berate Israel for allowing the violations to occur, Israeli settler-colonialism would not be targeted per se.
Therein lies the problem, though. Israel’s colonial state relies on ethnic cleansing in various forms – genocide included – to sustain itself. It was, after all, created on the back of Zionist terrorism and the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian population. Indeed, “Israel,” it has been said “wrote the State Terrorism Handbook, and follows it to the letter.”
Israel also eliminates Palestinian narratives of the genocide and the army’s use of Palestinians as human shields, but Al-Mezan Centre for Human Rights has documented testimonies of Palestinians used as human shields by Israeli soldiers. Israel may bide its time to claim that it is investigating, but it is incumbent on the rest of the world not to wait for the occupation state. We have all seen the results of what happens on Israel’s timeline. And the Palestinians do not need the genocide to be ongoing. As UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese said yesterday, “Genocidal violence has been happening since before 7 October 2023… How many warnings does the international community need to receive?”
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