Denial, its a state of being for you.
There are photos and videos of the 12,000 children Israel has killed.
So many videos, you will be watching them for the rest of your life.
Israel at war
- Thread starter Butler1000
- Start date
There are photos and videos of the 12,000 children Israel has killed.
So many videos, you will be watching them for the rest of your life.
Honour?
You support genocide and apartheid.
Who believes the Israeli military courts?
One week since ICJ ruling, Israel still carrying out violations in Gaza
Since the International Court of Justice (ICJ) issued an emergency ruling in the genocide case filed by South Africa against Israel in December, the following violations have been documented:
- Israeli forces killed more than 1,000 Palestinians across the Gaza Strip, according to the Ministry of Health.
- The Israeli army attacked a family in a car, killing all except one child – Hind, who is six. The Red Crescent dispatched two medics to evacuate her but the fate of all three remains unknown.
- A mass grave was found north of Gaza, where at least 30 Palestinian bodies were found handcuffed and blindfolded.
- Palestinians in Gaza released from Israeli detention have been sharing harrowing accounts of torture, beatings, starvation, humiliation and abuse, according to rights groups such as the Palestinian Prisoners Society and Addameer.
- Israel has intensified its siege on the Nasser Medical Complex and al-Amal Hospital in Khan Younis, pushing them out of service. The attacks included raids into the facilities, threats to people to evacuate at gunpoint, and the killing of at least three PRCS staff.
- Israel continued to issue evacuation orders, forcing thousands to leave Khan Younis and Gaza City. During displacements, Israel continued to target, detain and humiliate Palestinians, according to firsthand accounts and local journalist reports.
- Israel intensified its attacks against UNRWA, the main humanitarian agency in Gaza, leading several states to suspend their donations to the agency.
- Twelve ministers and 15 members of the Knesset attended a conference in Jerusalem calling for the annexation of Gaza. Itamar Ben-Gvir called for the “voluntary migration” of Palestinians while outlining a map of 21 settlements to be set up.
As usual, once your lies are exposed, all you can do is call genocide, fake, blah, blah. You don't address the fact that the ICJ did not make a statement saying "Israel HAS committed genocide. Israel must stop/cease committing genocide" or even "Israel must prevent genocide from continuing". There is no wording like that.
As such, your are the only one in denial.
No rational person believes anything that comes from Hamas. It's all BS, like that kid who still has dried blood on his face after 35 days. HAHAHAHAHAHA
Who believes the ridiculous pictures you post.
35 days and they haven't cleaned his face. Too funny.
They were not mandated with finding guilt or innocence, only whether SA's case was 'plausible' and could go to trial.
They gave Israel 30 days and all Israel has done is commit more genocide.
As usual you back Israel breaking the ICJ ruling by not preventing 'killing members of the group'.
So you agree that Israel has been found guilty of NOTHING.
Lie. Your definition of genocide is yours and yours alone. No lexicologist agrees with your definition. And why do you say MORE genocide? We just agreed that Israel has not been found guilty of genocide. See, that's how you sleazily lie.
Hamas are fair game. Israel broke no rulings. More lying by you. You have no honour.
Israel has been found to be apartheid and refuses to abide countless UN GA and dozens of UN SC resolutions.
Soon they will be on trial for genocide.
Right now you sound skoob defending rump.
Tell that to South Africa and the ICJ, where they are using that same definition and will use it when Israel goes on trial for genocide.
Your own personal definition 'that genocide is a crime that can't be committed by Jewish people' is just sad.
Israeli Arabs live under a different form of apartheid.
Its in the Amnesty, HRW, B'teselem and UN reports.
Read them.
Not by the courts/ICJ. So, that's a lie.
Come back to us when they are found guilty. Until then, your words mean nothing.
You and Hamas are bigger losers than trump.
Who comes up with your material? Go ahead. Find my quote. Make sure you include the thread and post number so we can see how much you doctored it.
I didn't say by the courts, I said by the UN, HRW, Amnesty and B'tselem.
Until there is a ceasefire it'll be similar material.
Guess why I highlighted that word?
Let's see that proof before we demand a shut down of funding.
Fuck, let's just see some convincing evidence if it is going to be a "pause" while people figure out whether or not to continue.
"Israel says so" isn't remotely good enough, especially during an active military campaign.
Why on earth would the far-right zionist government of Israel pressure itself to remove far right zionist elements from the cabinet?
~80% think Israel should call for a ceasefire
~80% think Israel is just doing what any country would do when attacked.
~80% thinks Hamas has proven itself a terrorist organization and must be neutralized.
People's positions on this are pretty jumbled.
"That looks horrible, we want it to stop" is always going to be popular, but is without context.
I would love to see Pennsylvania specific posting, though.
Israel bombed a Belgium funded and built building in Gaza this week after they supported the ICJ case.
The UNRWA?
In the line of fire: In Gaza, anyone can wind up a 'human shield' (msn.com)
Of all the phrases that get tossed about in fierce arguments over the current war in Gaza, one of the most common might be "human shield."
In both the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, and Israel's attacks on Gaza in the four months since then, civilians accounted for at least two-thirds of the victims.
Israel has argued that Hamas deliberately uses the civilian population of the Gaza Strip both to shield its fighters and to attempt to discredit Israel's legitimate efforts to defend itself — by portraying Israel as a callous killer of civilians in the court of public opinion, and in the Court of International Justice.
Critics of Israel's campaign have said the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) use the term as a catch-all excuse for killing thousands of civilians who were merely in proximity to Hamas fighters and infrastructure in a crowded territory where there is nowhere else for them to go. They also accuse Israel of hypocrisy and point to some of its army's own practices as classic examples of human shield use.
A recent legal concept
International law has only so much to say on the subject, and the legal concept of the human shield only dates back to 1977, when Protocol 1 was added to the Geneva Convention: "The presence or movements of the civilian population or individual civilians shall not be used to render certain points or areas immune from military operations, in particular in attempts to shield military objectives from attacks or to shield, favour or impede military operations."
Related video: Gaza conflict enters unprecedented 120th day as Israel-Hamas war becomes longest in Israeli history (The Times of Indi
In short, said international law professor Neve Gordon, "protected people — civilians — cannot be used to shield a legitimate military target. And if they are used, then it does not render the target immune from attack. I can still attack the target even if it is protected by human shields."
But the presence of "human shields" doesn't free an attacking army from the rule of proportionality — which states that the cost in civilian lives must be justified by the importance of the military objective. Even if one side cynically places civilians between itself and an enemy, that does not give the other side carte blanche to kill everybody.
Gordon, an Israeli-born professor of international law and human rights at Queen Mary University of London, is co-author of the book "Human shields: A History of People in the Line of Fire."
He said there have always been both voluntary and involuntary human shields. American Rachel Corrie— a volunteer with the pro-Palestinian International Solidarity Movement — or Greenpeace activists who used their own bodies to prevent nuclear weapons tests in the Pacific are examples of people who exposed themselves willingly.
Other human shields, Gordon said, are essentially hostages — "Me as a soldier taking a civilian, putting the civilian in front of me so that the other warring party won't try to kill me, or using the civilian to open a bag in a house to make sure it's not booby-trapped."
"Now, what we claim is that there is a third kind of human shield," Gordon told CBC News. "That is the human shield that does not volunteer and is not coerced, but just by being where they are, they become human shields. Or more precisely, I would say they're framed as human shields.
The IDF says this photo shows Gazan civilians, including children (circled), acting as voluntary human shields by assembling on the roof of a building that had received an IDF warning in 2014. (Israel Defense Forces)© Provided by cbc.ca
"In the Gaza Strip, for example, if the Hamas tunnels are a legitimate military target, and the tunnels span 700 kilometres, then they are under the whole Gaza Strip. So anyone above them becomes a human shield. And so you are casting or framing the whole civilian population almost as human shields.
"Now why is that important? Because according to international law, once someone is a 'human shield,' the law doesn't require you to protect them as much as you would protect a civilian … And when you kill them, the party to blame is not you that killed them, but the party that used them.
"That's the logic."
In Gaza, it's general knowledge that tunnels could be anywhere, but Palestinians say they are reluctant to discuss such matters publicly because they fear Hamas, which is constantly hunting for informers.
The buyer of an apartment knows better than to ask whether a tunnel runs under it. Such a question can lead to arrest and interrogation by a group that, like the IDF, has a well-documented pattern of using torture to extract information.
With an estimated 700 kilometres of tunnels beneath a territory of just 365 square kilometres, Gaza has few places far enough from a tunnel to escape the 380-meter blast radius of the largest bombs the IDF has dropped on the enclave.
Double standards
But Gordon said there is an inconsistency to the claim that mere proximity to military infrastructure makes a person a human shield.
"When Israel bombs a mosque or a school or an apartment building and kills civilians, it blames Hamas for using human shields. And yet Israel's military command centre is in central Tel Aviv, and its Southern Command centre is in the centre of Beersheba," he said. "And when Hamas bombs these cities, no one in the Western media says that the Israeli civilians around these centres are human shields.
"It's not proximity to fighting that renders you a shield. It's proximity to a non-state actor that is fighting."
By the same token, Canada's centre of war planning, the Department of National Defence, is located in downtown Ottawa despite being an obvious target in any war. But the government of Canada is not accused of using the shoppers at the neighbouring Rideau Centre as "human shields."
Western countries are as guilty as Israel of this double standard, said Gordon, citing the example of the two attacks on Mosul, Iraq.
Israeli soldiers are seen in a tunnel that the military says Hamas militants used to attack the Erez crossing in the northern Gaza Strip on Friday, Dec. 15, 2023. (Ariel Schalit/AP)© Provided by cbc.ca
"In 2014, ISIS attacks the city and captures it from the Iraqi forces and no one there is framed as a human shield," he said. "Only in 2016, when the Iraqi coalition, together with the U.S. military, recaptures Mosul do human rights organizations, the UN and the media frame the whole population in Mosul as human shields.
"The Western countries that are fighting in the Middle East don't want to seem as if they're killing civilians. Basically, any male person you kill from the age of 14 to 70 is automatically presumed to be a combatant. Therefore, Western countries either kill 'combatants' or 'human shields.' They never kill 'civilians.'
"This human shield argument is being mobilized as a legal argument to defend countries that have been killing many civilians."
The IDF and human shields
CBC News asked the IDF how it defines the term "human shield". An IDF spokesperson responded: "The exploitation of human shields is forbidden under international law. The IDF only targets individuals who are militants in terrorist group or those who are taking a direct part in the hostilities. Even when targeting such individuals and other military objectives, the IDF takes care to take feasible precautions to mitigate harm to civilians."
While the Israeli army has struggled to back up some specific claims about Hamas's use of human shields, its overall allegation has been supported by none other than the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), which has long complained about Hamas disrespecting its neutrality by hiding weapons in or near schools.
Hamas is clearly guilty of endangering civilians through reckless placement of weapons, but the IDF also has a long history of using Palestinian civilians, including children, as human shields in the classic sense: by literally forcing civilians to stand in front of them.
Israeli forces have been captured on camera tying a child to the hood of an armoured vehicle to discourage stone-throwing, placing blindfolded civilian captives in front of them and firing rifles directly over their shoulders, and forcing civilians to open doors where soldiers suspect danger.
When Israeli troops use a civilian home in the West Bank as a base of operations, they often make the family remain with them to discourage attacks.
The 'neighbour procedure'
The practice of seizing civilians to use as human shields in operations in the Occupied Territories was so routine by the 1990s it had a euphemistic name: the "neighbour procedure."
In August 2002, while a coalition of Israeli and Palestinian rights groups were in court trying to have the neighbour procedure banned, Israeli troops forced a young man called Nidal Abu Mukhsan to stand in front of them as they approached a house where a Hamas militant was holed up, resulting in Mukhsan's death.
The Israeli Supreme Court then issued an order banning the neighbour procedure. But the army was reluctant to give it up; it petitioned the court to allow Israeli troops to continue to place civilians in front of them if the civilian "consented" to the procedure.
Rights groups argued that no Palestinian civilian would be likely to refuse consent when faced with a group of armed Israeli soldiers, but the court sided with the IDF and approved a nominally consensual "prior warning procedure."
Further incidents followed, some involving children, until in 2005 the Supreme Court also banned the prior warning procedure.
Two years after the ban, rights group B'tselem reported on 14 more cases in which children as young as 11 were forced by Israeli soldiers to act as human shields. In one case, a 14-year-old girl in Gaza was shot twice while being used as a shield.
One of two Israeli soldiers convicted of using a 9-year-old Palestinian boy as a human shield during the 2008-2009 Gaza conflict, center, talks with Uzi Dayan, a former general and national security adviser to two Israeli prime ministers, left, outside a military court near the southern Israeli town of Kiryat Malakhi on Sunday, Nov. 21, 2010. (Tsafrir Abayov/The Associated Press)© Provided by cbc.ca
IDF prosecutors were often reluctant to enforce the rules. They charged two soldiers who forced a nine-year-old boy in Gaza to open a bag they thought contained a bomb, but declined to bring charges against Brig-Gen. Yair Golan, accused in five separate cases. Golan would later go on to become deputy chief of staff of the IDF (and later a left-wing politician and a figure of hate for Israel's far right).
Israeli human rights group Breaking the Silence has published video interviews with former soldiers who discuss the continued use of the procedure.
The most recent documented use of a civilian human shield was two weeks ago in the West Bank town of Dura, where cellphone store owner Baha Abu Ras was used by a soldier who placed him in front of him and aimed his rifle over his shoulder. Once they were done with him, the soldiers let Abu Ras go. He was not accused of involvement in any armed group.
Israeli soldiers did not know that they were being filmed from an upstairs window. The footage, later aired on CBS News and by Reuters, showed that the "neighbour procedure" is still in use.
Denying civilians their status
Both sides in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict routinely question the non-combatant status of people on the other side who normally would be considered civilians.
Hamas has long argued that every Israeli male over the age of 18 is a combatant, citing the fact that Israel conscripts almost all Jewish males into its armed forces and then typically expects them to serve in its reserves for many years.
Hamas has even divided its Israeli hostages into civilian and military categories based on that interpretation, treating any Israeli man who has previously served in the IDF as a military hostage with lower priority for release (and, perhaps, a higher price tag in any eventual exchange).
The distinctions Hamas makes are academic in any case, since it has long targeted Israeli civilians of both genders and all ages, who live within Israel's borders, using suicide bombers, rockets, ramming and shooting attacks and other means.
Hamas cares enough about its image to deny some of the worst atrocities alleged by Israel in its October 7 attack, although its deliberate killing of hundreds of unarmed Israeli civilians was thoroughly documented.
A Palestinian woman cries as she sits next to her girl wounded in the Israeli bombardment of the Gaza Strip while receiving treatment at the Nasser hospital in Khan Younis, Southern Gaza Strip, on Monday, Jan. 22, 2024. (Mohammed Dahman/Associated Press)© Provided by cbc.ca
Israeli officials also have made statements that suggest Palestinian civilians could be seen as targets. Perhaps the most notorious was a remark by Israeli President Isaac Herzog that was cited by the International Court of Justice in its recent decision, in which it found evidence of violations of the Genocide Convention (although a final ruling may be years away).
"It is an entire nation out there that is responsible," Herzog said. "It is not true this rhetoric about civilians not aware, not involved. It is absolutely not true."
Other Israeli officials were also cited by the court. Herzog has complained his remarks were misconstrued.
Given the high death toll in Israel's Gaza campaign, described even by close ally President Joe Biden as the product of "indiscriminate bombing," claims about human shields seem likely to form a major part of Israel's defence against the charge of genocide.
'The whole notion of a civilian could disappear'
Gordon said there is an urgent need for nations to clarify who is a human shield, and to ensure the definition of mere proximity isn't allowed to erase the spirit of the laws of armed conflict.
"More and more, warfare is moving to the cities," he told CBC News. "If this argument succeeds, then the whole notion of 'civilian' disappears, because the only way non-state actors can fight against high-tech states that have amazing surveillance apparatuses and amazing weapons is to go to the cities. And that's what they've been doing, not only in Israel-Palestine, but throughout the Middle East.
"And so if we accept this argument of proximity to non-state fighters, then the whole idea of a civilian and hospitals and schools that need to be protected will be gone. That is what is at stake and the stakes are very high. So I really hope that the judges will be able to see what the ramifications of their rulings will be, so that we don't end up in a situation [where] international law cannot protect civilians."
Of all the phrases that get tossed about in fierce arguments over the current war in Gaza, one of the most common might be "human shield."
In both the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, and Israel's attacks on Gaza in the four months since then, civilians accounted for at least two-thirds of the victims.
Israel has argued that Hamas deliberately uses the civilian population of the Gaza Strip both to shield its fighters and to attempt to discredit Israel's legitimate efforts to defend itself — by portraying Israel as a callous killer of civilians in the court of public opinion, and in the Court of International Justice.
Critics of Israel's campaign have said the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) use the term as a catch-all excuse for killing thousands of civilians who were merely in proximity to Hamas fighters and infrastructure in a crowded territory where there is nowhere else for them to go. They also accuse Israel of hypocrisy and point to some of its army's own practices as classic examples of human shield use.
A recent legal concept
International law has only so much to say on the subject, and the legal concept of the human shield only dates back to 1977, when Protocol 1 was added to the Geneva Convention: "The presence or movements of the civilian population or individual civilians shall not be used to render certain points or areas immune from military operations, in particular in attempts to shield military objectives from attacks or to shield, favour or impede military operations."
In short, said international law professor Neve Gordon, "protected people — civilians — cannot be used to shield a legitimate military target. And if they are used, then it does not render the target immune from attack. I can still attack the target even if it is protected by human shields."
But the presence of "human shields" doesn't free an attacking army from the rule of proportionality — which states that the cost in civilian lives must be justified by the importance of the military objective. Even if one side cynically places civilians between itself and an enemy, that does not give the other side carte blanche to kill everybody.
Gordon, an Israeli-born professor of international law and human rights at Queen Mary University of London, is co-author of the book "Human shields: A History of People in the Line of Fire."
He said there have always been both voluntary and involuntary human shields. American Rachel Corrie— a volunteer with the pro-Palestinian International Solidarity Movement — or Greenpeace activists who used their own bodies to prevent nuclear weapons tests in the Pacific are examples of people who exposed themselves willingly.
Other human shields, Gordon said, are essentially hostages — "Me as a soldier taking a civilian, putting the civilian in front of me so that the other warring party won't try to kill me, or using the civilian to open a bag in a house to make sure it's not booby-trapped."
"Now, what we claim is that there is a third kind of human shield," Gordon told CBC News. "That is the human shield that does not volunteer and is not coerced, but just by being where they are, they become human shields. Or more precisely, I would say they're framed as human shields.
The IDF says this photo shows Gazan civilians, including children (circled), acting as voluntary human shields by assembling on the roof of a building that had received an IDF warning in 2014. (Israel Defense Forces)© Provided by cbc.ca
"In the Gaza Strip, for example, if the Hamas tunnels are a legitimate military target, and the tunnels span 700 kilometres, then they are under the whole Gaza Strip. So anyone above them becomes a human shield. And so you are casting or framing the whole civilian population almost as human shields.
"Now why is that important? Because according to international law, once someone is a 'human shield,' the law doesn't require you to protect them as much as you would protect a civilian … And when you kill them, the party to blame is not you that killed them, but the party that used them.
"That's the logic."
In Gaza, it's general knowledge that tunnels could be anywhere, but Palestinians say they are reluctant to discuss such matters publicly because they fear Hamas, which is constantly hunting for informers.
The buyer of an apartment knows better than to ask whether a tunnel runs under it. Such a question can lead to arrest and interrogation by a group that, like the IDF, has a well-documented pattern of using torture to extract information.
With an estimated 700 kilometres of tunnels beneath a territory of just 365 square kilometres, Gaza has few places far enough from a tunnel to escape the 380-meter blast radius of the largest bombs the IDF has dropped on the enclave.
Double standards
But Gordon said there is an inconsistency to the claim that mere proximity to military infrastructure makes a person a human shield.
"When Israel bombs a mosque or a school or an apartment building and kills civilians, it blames Hamas for using human shields. And yet Israel's military command centre is in central Tel Aviv, and its Southern Command centre is in the centre of Beersheba," he said. "And when Hamas bombs these cities, no one in the Western media says that the Israeli civilians around these centres are human shields.
"It's not proximity to fighting that renders you a shield. It's proximity to a non-state actor that is fighting."
By the same token, Canada's centre of war planning, the Department of National Defence, is located in downtown Ottawa despite being an obvious target in any war. But the government of Canada is not accused of using the shoppers at the neighbouring Rideau Centre as "human shields."
Western countries are as guilty as Israel of this double standard, said Gordon, citing the example of the two attacks on Mosul, Iraq.
Israeli soldiers are seen in a tunnel that the military says Hamas militants used to attack the Erez crossing in the northern Gaza Strip on Friday, Dec. 15, 2023. (Ariel Schalit/AP)© Provided by cbc.ca
"In 2014, ISIS attacks the city and captures it from the Iraqi forces and no one there is framed as a human shield," he said. "Only in 2016, when the Iraqi coalition, together with the U.S. military, recaptures Mosul do human rights organizations, the UN and the media frame the whole population in Mosul as human shields.
"The Western countries that are fighting in the Middle East don't want to seem as if they're killing civilians. Basically, any male person you kill from the age of 14 to 70 is automatically presumed to be a combatant. Therefore, Western countries either kill 'combatants' or 'human shields.' They never kill 'civilians.'
"This human shield argument is being mobilized as a legal argument to defend countries that have been killing many civilians."
The IDF and human shields
CBC News asked the IDF how it defines the term "human shield". An IDF spokesperson responded: "The exploitation of human shields is forbidden under international law. The IDF only targets individuals who are militants in terrorist group or those who are taking a direct part in the hostilities. Even when targeting such individuals and other military objectives, the IDF takes care to take feasible precautions to mitigate harm to civilians."
While the Israeli army has struggled to back up some specific claims about Hamas's use of human shields, its overall allegation has been supported by none other than the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), which has long complained about Hamas disrespecting its neutrality by hiding weapons in or near schools.
Hamas is clearly guilty of endangering civilians through reckless placement of weapons, but the IDF also has a long history of using Palestinian civilians, including children, as human shields in the classic sense: by literally forcing civilians to stand in front of them.
Israeli forces have been captured on camera tying a child to the hood of an armoured vehicle to discourage stone-throwing, placing blindfolded civilian captives in front of them and firing rifles directly over their shoulders, and forcing civilians to open doors where soldiers suspect danger.
When Israeli troops use a civilian home in the West Bank as a base of operations, they often make the family remain with them to discourage attacks.
The 'neighbour procedure'
The practice of seizing civilians to use as human shields in operations in the Occupied Territories was so routine by the 1990s it had a euphemistic name: the "neighbour procedure."
In August 2002, while a coalition of Israeli and Palestinian rights groups were in court trying to have the neighbour procedure banned, Israeli troops forced a young man called Nidal Abu Mukhsan to stand in front of them as they approached a house where a Hamas militant was holed up, resulting in Mukhsan's death.
The Israeli Supreme Court then issued an order banning the neighbour procedure. But the army was reluctant to give it up; it petitioned the court to allow Israeli troops to continue to place civilians in front of them if the civilian "consented" to the procedure.
Rights groups argued that no Palestinian civilian would be likely to refuse consent when faced with a group of armed Israeli soldiers, but the court sided with the IDF and approved a nominally consensual "prior warning procedure."
Further incidents followed, some involving children, until in 2005 the Supreme Court also banned the prior warning procedure.
Two years after the ban, rights group B'tselem reported on 14 more cases in which children as young as 11 were forced by Israeli soldiers to act as human shields. In one case, a 14-year-old girl in Gaza was shot twice while being used as a shield.
One of two Israeli soldiers convicted of using a 9-year-old Palestinian boy as a human shield during the 2008-2009 Gaza conflict, center, talks with Uzi Dayan, a former general and national security adviser to two Israeli prime ministers, left, outside a military court near the southern Israeli town of Kiryat Malakhi on Sunday, Nov. 21, 2010. (Tsafrir Abayov/The Associated Press)© Provided by cbc.ca
IDF prosecutors were often reluctant to enforce the rules. They charged two soldiers who forced a nine-year-old boy in Gaza to open a bag they thought contained a bomb, but declined to bring charges against Brig-Gen. Yair Golan, accused in five separate cases. Golan would later go on to become deputy chief of staff of the IDF (and later a left-wing politician and a figure of hate for Israel's far right).
Israeli human rights group Breaking the Silence has published video interviews with former soldiers who discuss the continued use of the procedure.
The most recent documented use of a civilian human shield was two weeks ago in the West Bank town of Dura, where cellphone store owner Baha Abu Ras was used by a soldier who placed him in front of him and aimed his rifle over his shoulder. Once they were done with him, the soldiers let Abu Ras go. He was not accused of involvement in any armed group.
Israeli soldiers did not know that they were being filmed from an upstairs window. The footage, later aired on CBS News and by Reuters, showed that the "neighbour procedure" is still in use.
Denying civilians their status
Both sides in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict routinely question the non-combatant status of people on the other side who normally would be considered civilians.
Hamas has long argued that every Israeli male over the age of 18 is a combatant, citing the fact that Israel conscripts almost all Jewish males into its armed forces and then typically expects them to serve in its reserves for many years.
Hamas has even divided its Israeli hostages into civilian and military categories based on that interpretation, treating any Israeli man who has previously served in the IDF as a military hostage with lower priority for release (and, perhaps, a higher price tag in any eventual exchange).
The distinctions Hamas makes are academic in any case, since it has long targeted Israeli civilians of both genders and all ages, who live within Israel's borders, using suicide bombers, rockets, ramming and shooting attacks and other means.
Hamas cares enough about its image to deny some of the worst atrocities alleged by Israel in its October 7 attack, although its deliberate killing of hundreds of unarmed Israeli civilians was thoroughly documented.
A Palestinian woman cries as she sits next to her girl wounded in the Israeli bombardment of the Gaza Strip while receiving treatment at the Nasser hospital in Khan Younis, Southern Gaza Strip, on Monday, Jan. 22, 2024. (Mohammed Dahman/Associated Press)© Provided by cbc.ca
Israeli officials also have made statements that suggest Palestinian civilians could be seen as targets. Perhaps the most notorious was a remark by Israeli President Isaac Herzog that was cited by the International Court of Justice in its recent decision, in which it found evidence of violations of the Genocide Convention (although a final ruling may be years away).
"It is an entire nation out there that is responsible," Herzog said. "It is not true this rhetoric about civilians not aware, not involved. It is absolutely not true."
Other Israeli officials were also cited by the court. Herzog has complained his remarks were misconstrued.
Given the high death toll in Israel's Gaza campaign, described even by close ally President Joe Biden as the product of "indiscriminate bombing," claims about human shields seem likely to form a major part of Israel's defence against the charge of genocide.
'The whole notion of a civilian could disappear'
Gordon said there is an urgent need for nations to clarify who is a human shield, and to ensure the definition of mere proximity isn't allowed to erase the spirit of the laws of armed conflict.
"More and more, warfare is moving to the cities," he told CBC News. "If this argument succeeds, then the whole notion of 'civilian' disappears, because the only way non-state actors can fight against high-tech states that have amazing surveillance apparatuses and amazing weapons is to go to the cities. And that's what they've been doing, not only in Israel-Palestine, but throughout the Middle East.
"And so if we accept this argument of proximity to non-state fighters, then the whole idea of a civilian and hospitals and schools that need to be protected will be gone. That is what is at stake and the stakes are very high. So I really hope that the judges will be able to see what the ramifications of their rulings will be, so that we don't end up in a situation [where] international law cannot protect civilians."
The questions asked are quite often loaded.
'Do you think Israel has gone too far?', for instance.
Even so, the support for a ceasefire has been pretty consistent.
