It’s news because its revelatory but it’s not news because it happens time and time again between Israel and its interaction with its neighbors. The latest Gaza incursion was a bloodfest which made it a war crime. Max Blumenthal writes about that conclusively here.
Dan Cohen and I conducted an interview with two ICRC volunteers from Gaza, 25-year-old Ahmed Awad, and 24-year-old Ala’a Alkusofi, who worked with ambulance crews throughout the war, the video of which will be released in the near future. They recalled entering Khuza’a during the siege of the town to collect the body of Mohamed Abadla, a local man who had been tied to a tree by both arms and riddled with bullets. When they arrived at the execution site, a group of Israeli soldiers ordered one of the volunteers’ colleagues to exit the ambulance, walk five meters forward, then light a cigarette lighters. When he did so, they shot him in the heart and leg, killing him in front of his colleagues.
The ICRC volunteers told us they later found a man in Khuza’a with rigor mortis, holding both hands over his head in surrender, his body filled with bullets. They then discovered a family — men, women and children — so badly decomposed they had to bury them with a bulldozer in a mass grave. The vast majority of bullet wounds they found were to the head and chest.
In Beit Hanoun, a northern border city that had been comprehensively by Israeli shelling, I met Abdul Rahman, a 50-year-old farmer whose orange groves, bee farm, goat herd, wheat fields and four story home had all been destroyed prior to or during Operation Protective Edge. Rahman told me how his neighbors, the Wahadan family, had been prevented from evacuating by Israeli forces, who warned them they would be shot if they left. Remember that the Israeli military dropped leaflets on Beit Hanoun warning its residents to leave just prior to the ground invasion. A week after trapping seven members of the Wahadan family, the Israeli air force bombed their home, killing seven members, including two-year-old Ghena Wahadan. The survivors of the family were male relatives who had been abducted and interrogated for days in Israeli prisons.
Were the Wahadans used as human shields? That’s an open and legitimate question. In other areas, I documented cases in which the use of human shields by Israeli soldiers was undeniable. On the outskirts of Rafah, for instance, soldiers stripped 19-year-old Mahmoud Abu Said of his clothes and stood him in front of windows in his home while they sniped at his neighbors. In Khuza’a, members of the Najjar family told me soldiers forced them to stand at opposite corners of their roof for a full day. And in the northern village of Oum Al Nasser, members of the Mismeh, Madhoun and Jarrad family told me they forced to sit in the center of town for three hours between 6:30am and 9:30am on July 18 — 100 meters in front of Israeli tanks.
You will not hear about this case of Israel using human shields as it kills Palestinians although the contrast is certainly the case. Also you can be sure nothing will happen as a result of this exposure although plenty will be said about any cases where Palestinians did such a criminal act and some sort of punitive action will result this is why although it is newsworthy this happened repeatedly during the Gaza invasion last month, nothing will result from it.
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