After setting fire to his home in northern Gaza, Israeli troops separated Ramez al-Skafi from his family and took him into custody. They had thought of a special job for him, he tells Guardian the 30 year old man. For the next eleven days, in early July this year, Al Skafi says he was sent from house to house in his home district, Shuyaiya, while under surveillance by the Israeli military. According to him, he was used as a human shield against the explosives and armed men of Hamas.
“I tried to resist, but they started beating me and the officer told me that it was not my decision and that I had to do what they wanted,” says Al Skafi. “He told me that my job would be to search the houses and give them information about the owners. After putting myself under maximum pressure, I had no choice.”
“The next day they told me to go out on patrol with the Israeli soldiers. I was very scared by the tanks in front of me and the planes flying above me. When they realized I was scared, they assured me, ‘They know you’re with us.’”
Al Skafi is one of three Palestinians interviewed by Guardian They claim to have been used by units of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), which forced them to go ahead of soldiers in search of explosives in unexplored homes and tunnels in Gaza. According to the complainants, who spoke with the group of former soldiers critical of the Army Breaking The Silence (BTS), this is a widespread practice.
The “sergeants” who protect the troops
The forced use of Palestinian civilians to enter homes and tunnels in Gaza first came to light in images broadcast by the Al Jazeera television network last June and July. In August, another investigation by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz collected testimonies from Israeli soldiers who said that Palestinians used as shields were known as shawisha word of Turkish origin that means sergeant. The soldiers maintained that this is an institutionalized tactic, approved by superior officers.
“It is carried out with the knowledge of the brigade commander, at a minimum,” said a recruit from a combat unit. However, the use of prisoners as human shields is a clear violation of the Geneva Conventions and is also expressly prohibited by Israeli law. For its part, the IDF denies having used Palestinians as shawish.
The Israeli military stated in a statement that its “orders and guidelines prohibit the use of detained Gazan civilians for military missions that endanger them. “The protocols and orders have been clarified to the troops.” In the text, he added that the complaints would be “examined by the competent authorities.” But the testimonies of former Palestinian detainees collected by Guardian largely coincide with the information from Al Jazeera and Haaretz.
During his detention, Al Skafi tells the media that, on several occasions, he was forced to carry a small aerial drone, known as a quadcopter, in his hands and to enter the houses that were going to be searched so that the Israeli soldiers They could see what was inside through the cameras built into the devices. “Once I finished filming the inside of the houses and left, they came in and started tearing them down,” explains the Palestinian.
“Every day, when they finished with me, they tied my hands and covered my eyes. They only took off my chains when they fed me or when they let me go to the bathroom.” He also claims that on the sixth day of being used to clear houses in Shuyaiya, his Army captors were shot by a Hamas gunman, leading to a shootout and a standoff that lasted from noon until night.
“During that time, they used me as a human shield. I was in the middle. They told the resistance fighter: ‘Turn yourself in or we will kill this civilian,’” he says. When the IDF finally managed to kill that Hamas fighter, they forced Al Skafi to enter the house that he had used as a sniper position to photograph the body with a mobile phone.
After that episode, Al Skafi was beaten and interrogated for four days by the military because the position of the sniper they shot down was in a house that he had previously inspected, as he told the press. Therefore, the troops were furious with the young man and accused him of having hidden the attacker’s presence.
On the fourth day of interrogation, the unit’s senior officer came to him with a plate of rice and told him that Al Skafi’s version of events had been proven to be true. That same officer was the one who informed him that the unit’s operations in Shuyaiya were ending and that Al Skafi was no longer needed.
On his eleventh day of detention, his shackles were removed, he was given a bag with food and water, and told to go home. Al Skafi told the soldiers that he was too exhausted to carry a heavy package; but they replied that the bag would identify him as someone who had worked with the IDF, so he would not be the target of Israeli fire as he made his way back through Shuyaiya, until he returned to his family.
A “very used” protocol
The testimony of Al Skafi and other former Palestinian detainees in Gaza generally confirms accounts given by Israeli soldiers to other media outlets and activist groups. In a recent incident, details of which were provided to Guardian by friends of the Israeli involved, a shawish Palestinian grabbed an IDF soldier’s gun and, in the struggle, shot the soldier in the foot, before the Palestinian was shot dead by other uniformed members of the unit.
According to the testimony of an informant to the BTS group, the use of human shields is widespread.
“In the company we had a guy who spoke Arabic and… he sent them [a los detenidos palestinos] to open the houses so that, if there was a bomb, they would be the ones who would jump into the air” first, an IDF soldier told BTS, who stated that one of the human shields used was a Palestinian teenager.
“As far as we know, this is a widely used protocol, which means that hundreds of Palestinians in Gaza have been used as human shields,” says Nadav Weiman, a former Army sniper and now director of BTS. “Palestinians are taken from humanitarian corridors in Gaza… and subsequently transferred to different units within Gaza, regular infantry units, not special forces,” he adds. “And those Palestinians are being used as human shields to explore tunnels and also houses. In some cases, a GoPro camera is placed on their chest or head and, in almost all cases, they are handcuffed and dressed in IDF uniforms before being sent to a tunnel or a house.”
For Palestinian detainees, wearing an Israeli uniform is a source of particular shame, and the three interviewed by Guardian They say they had successfully resisted the pressure to wear the IDF uniform. All three claim they were deliberately put in danger to protect Israeli soldiers.
“They took us on missions with them, in which we had to go ahead to guarantee their safety. They entered the houses after us and when they left, they used to blow up the house,” says Ismail al Sawalhi, a 30-year-old blacksmith and farmer in the Jabalia refugee camp in northern Gaza.
Al Sawalhi was detained in July near the Kerem Shalom border crossing in the southern Gaza Strip and forced to work as a human shield for an IDF unit during twelve days of clearance operations in Rafah. “The soldiers protected themselves with us all the time so as not to be attacked by the resistance. For them we were like toys.”
A 35-year-old man from Beit Lahia, northern Gaza, who identified himself as Abu Said for fear of reprisals, but whose identity was verified by Guardiansays he was detained in February and used as a human shield for a four-hour period.
“The Israeli soldiers put a GPS locator in my hand and told me: ‘If you try to flee, we will shoot you. We will know where you are,’” he says. “They asked me to go knock on the doors of four houses and two schools, and ask people to leave: first the women and children, and then the men.”
“In one of the schools, the situation was very dangerous. I shouted to everyone in the school to leave quietly, but at that moment there was heavy gunfire from the army and I thought I was going to die.” At the end of the day, his tracker was removed and he was told to leave the area by waving a white flag they had provided. “If you don’t do what they ask, they will kill you without hesitation,” he says.
The use of prisoners as human shields is prohibited by Article 28 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which states that “no protected person may be used to protect, by his presence, certain points or certain regions against military operations.”
In 2002, Israel’s High Court issued a court order prohibiting the military from using a practice referred to as the “neighbor procedure,” which consisted of detaining a Palestinian and ordering him to knock on the doors of his neighbors, and supervise the eviction of their houses. However, the use of human shields continued.
In 2010, two IDF sergeants were dismissed for forcing a nine-year-old Palestinian boy to open several bags suspected of containing explosives. According to Bill van Esveld, Human Rights Watch’s associate director for children’s rights in the Middle East and North Africa, “there is an extensive history of well-documented accounts by UN agencies as well as human rights groups. , and indications that Israel is aware of the problem, but does not act on it.” In his opinion, “it is not surprising that this long-standing problem persists.”
Translation by Julián Cnochaert.
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