...During Operation “Cast Lead” Israeli forces repeatedly took over Palestinian homes in the
Gaza Strip forcing families to stay in a ground-floor room while they used the rest of their
house as a military base and sniper position – effectively using the families, both adults and
children, as “human shields” and putting them at risk.72 While soldiers wore protective body
armour and helmets and shielded themselves behind sandbags as they fired from the houses,
the Palestinian inhabitants of the houses had no such protection.
In the al-Zaytoun district of Gaza City, Israeli soldiers took over several houses of the
extended al-Sammouni family when they entered the area. As’ad ‘Ali al-Sammouni told
Amnesty International: “I live in this house with my wife, my three married sons and their
wives and 11 children and my four unmarried sons. My two nephews, their wives and 15
children were also staying with us. We were some 45 people in all. In the night between 3
and 4 January we heard noises up on the roof terrace and we concluded that the soldiers
must have descended from a helicopter because the gate and the front door were locked and
no one could have entered the house from anywhere else. We heard them banging up on the
roof terrace but nobody could dare to go upstairs to see what was happening. We all stayed
on the ground floor. At about 6.30am there was banging at the front door and lots of soldiers
came in. They grabbed me by the scruff of the neck and asked about Qassams and I said we
did not have any such things. They tied and blindfolded all of us – men and boys – and put
us all in one room in the ground floor, together with the women and children. I asked them to
let me get my dentures from my room but they did not let me. After the end of the war I
found them on them on the floor, broken, like so many other things. We were kept there for a
day and a half. We only had a little bit of food for the children but not enough. Also we did
not have water. On the second day (5 January) my cousin Mousa and his wife and baby girl
came to knock at the door after they escaped from the house of my relative Wa’el across the
road, which had been shelled and many relatives had been killed. The soldiers took him too
and tied him and blindfolded him and put him and his wife and baby in the same room with
us. When Mousa told us that Wa’el’s house had been shelled and many relatives had been
killed and injured the women and children screamed and cried and the soldiers came and
asked what we wanted and we begged them to let us leave. In the end the army said we
could leave except for Mousa and my nephew ‘Imad and they said that if the Qassam fighters
found out that there were soldiers in the house and attacked them they would kill Mousa and
‘Imad. I asked again to fetch my dentures but the soldiers refused. I found them broken
when I returned the house after the army left Gaza. We left on foot and some other relatives
from nearby houses also joined us. The soldiers said we had to walk and not stop. My nephew
Iyad was walking ahead of me and I saw him fall and I thought he had tripped but then I saw
he had been shot in the left leg. I stopped to help but Israeli soldiers in the Jouha family
house shouted to continue walking or they would shoot again so we had to keep walking. Iyad
crawled for a bit and then collapsed. His wife and his five children saw him being shot and
then crawl and collapse but they and us could not help him because the soldier did not allow
anyone to stop. Further on the main Salahaddin Road we found an ambulance but they could
not go to the place where Iyad had collapsed and so he was left to die where he had
collapsed. The ambulance took Mousa’s wife and baby girl, who was injured in her hand, to
the hospital.”
Members of the Jouha family, interviewed separately by Amnesty International, corroborated
the account of events (see case of Ibrahim Jouha in Appendix 1).
Yousef Abu ‘Ida (also known as Abu ‘Abdallah), and his wife Leila and their nine children,
five daughters and four sons aged between four and 22, were in their home in Hay al-Salam
(Peace Neighbourhood), to the east of Jabalia. Israeli soldiers forcibly took over their house
and held the family as “human shields” for two days while they used the house as a military
position, then they forced the family out and later destroyed the house. Abu ‘Abdallah told
Amnesty International: “At about 10.30am on 5 January a group of soldiers entered our
home, and locked all of us in the basement while they went upstairs. They took our mobile
phone and did not allow us to move. They took all the blankets and mattresses. We had no
food and no water. The children were scared, cold, hungry and thirsty but we had nothing.
We were kept like that for two days. We heard the soldiers laughing and shooting upstairs. We
were scared. After a day the younger children were desperate for water and I took the bit of
water which remained in the cistern of the toilet to give to them; there was no other
alternative. After two days, on the morning of 7 January, the soldiers threw us out of the
house. I asked to go upstairs to fetch some clothes and shoes but they did not allow us. We
had to leave barefoot and with only what we were wearing when the soldiers first came into
the house two days earlier.” The house was later destroyed (see Chapter 3.1).
According to testimonies, in several cases Israeli forces also forced unarmed Palestinian
civilian males (mostly adults but in two cases also children) to serve as “human shields”,
including making them walk in front of armed soldiers; go into buildings to check for booby
traps or gunmen; and inspect suspicious objects for explosives. These practices are not new.
Numerous such cases have been documented in recent years and the Israeli Supreme Court
has ruled that such practices contradict international law and prohibited them in October
2005.73
Majdi Abed Rabbo, a father of five and a member of the PA security forces, told Amnesty
International: “At about 10am on Monday 5 January soldiers came to my house and took me
with them to a neighbour’s house where they were also keeping other neighbours. The
soldiers were shooting from the house but I don’t know at what because I could not see. At
about 2pm a soldier took me outside, pointed to Abu Hatem’s house and told me to go into
that house to take the weapons and the clothes of the armed men who were in that house,
whom they had killed. I refused but they told me to obey. I went into the house, and found
three armed Qassam members alive. They told me to leave and not to come back and
threatened to shoot me if I went back. I returned to the soldiers, who made me undress and
turn around, and I then told them that the three were alive. They handcuffed me; they were
shooting. Later they again sent me to check on the armed militants inside the house. I found
one wounded and the others alright, who said: ‘Tell the officer that if he is a man, he can
come up here himself.’ I went back and told the soldiers and they cursed me and handcuffed
me. I heard a helicopter approaching, followed by the sound of a missile exploding. The
soldiers said that now they were sure they had killed the armed men in the house with the
missile. But when I looked I saw that the missile had struck my house and not the house with
the gunmen inside. I told the soldiers. At about midnight, between Monday and Tuesday, I
was forced to go for a third time, to check if the gunmen were dead. I found two of the
gunmen still alive, but buried under the rubble; the third was still holding his weapon. I told
the soldier, who got angrier and didn’t believe me and sent two teenagers, Jamal Qatari and
Zidane, to take photos. The two refused but the soldiers beat them and so they went and took
photos and then the soldiers sent in a dog. By then it was about 10 or 11am.”
His neighbour and relative Akram Abed Rabbo, a father of six, also told Amnesty
International that he had been taken from his home in the early morning (about 2-3am) on 6
January by Israeli soldiers who also used him as a “human shield” and forced him to inspect
several houses in the area over a three-day period. He said: “The soldiers sent me into the
houses first and then they sent in the dog and only after that they went into the houses
themselves. I didn’t find anything in the houses I inspected, but I was afraid. Also, in the
meantime I had no idea where my wife, who is pregnant, and my children were.”
In Khuza’a, east of Khan Yunis, Mohammed al-Najjar, 16, told Amnesty International that on
13 January he was held by Israeli soldiers in a house they used as a sniper position: “The
soldiers, special forces, took me to the house. I was handcuffed and blindfolded but they
untied me when they let me go to the toilet so I could see a bit then. They didn’t interrogate
me. They just sat around on a mattress and chatted and laughed and also sang a bit. I didn’t
understand what they said because they spoke in Hebrew, but one of them spoke to me in
Arabic and told me to sing with them; I refused at first but then I had to obey. Then they shot
a couple of shots and I heard women nearby screaming ‘God is great’ and crying. Later I
knew that this is when they killed our neighbour Rawhiya.74 I was afraid but nothing else
happened; there was no other shooting. Later, before they left the house they told me to stay
in the house for a while and that when I heard a shot being fired I could leave. I did as they
said; I waited a bit and then took off the blindfold and left the house.75
According to Article 28 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, “The presence of a protected
person may not be used to render certain points or areas immune from military operations.”
The prohibition against the use of “human shields” is further clarified in Article 51(7) of the
Protocol Additional to the Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949, and relating to the
Protection of Victims of International Armed Conflicts (Additional Protocol I). It states:
“Parties to the conflict shall not direct the movement of the civilian population or individual
civilians in order to attempt to shield military objectives from attacks or to shield military
operations.”
