lqbal Tamimi
Israeli Soldiers force Palestinians to approach, enter and search buildings where they believe gunmen may be hiding.
The civilians are subjected to different forms of manipulations to use them as human shields during operations to acquire control of the houses, detaining inhabitants in one place (often in one room of the house) and turning the houses into military barracks, and using the occupants as human shields to deter any counter-attacks. They then force them to perform acts and chores on behalf of the soldiers like opening outlets in the walls or removing the floor tiles to use as barriers to protect the soldiers near the windows.
All of that happens during the time the occupation forces would open machine gun fire by its snipers from these houses to shoot at anything moving in the area.
The occupation forces arrest civilians and force them to walk in front of its soldiers at gunpoint, aiming to protect its soldiers by using the civilians as human shields.
Other methods include arresting one or more civilians and forcing them to perform tasks during military operations, such as knocking on the doors of other citizens to inform them that they are wanted and to order them to surrender, or to force them to conduct inspections on behalf of the soldiers to check suspicious objects.
The occupation forces continue to repeat the worst violations of human rights and norms of international law by using the civilians as human shields: especially children, which shows the disrespect and carelessness of those officers when it comes to civilians lives and the indifferent attitude towards risking the lives of innocent people to provide protection to its own military forces, who usually need protection while carrying out their attacks.
The young Palestinian child Rana Alnabaheen is a good example of how Israeli forces exhibit disregard for the lives of children. She was used as a human shield by a group of Israeli soldiers, exposing her to the shooting of other soldiers in the area. The soldier who used her as a human shield never even cared to inform the other soldiers accompanying him that he was using the child, and that she was moving upon his own orders.
Sameh Amira is another child subjected to being used as a human shield. He was escorted by heavily armed Israeli soldiers on a door-to-door sweep in Nablus, providing some of the strongest evidence to date that the Israeli army is still using Palestinian civilians as human shields.
Israeli soldiers were filmed using Sameh Amira as a human shield on February 25, during a week-long raid into the West Bank city of Nablus. He was made to search homes in the city’s casbah, ( the old city), during a search for wanted men and bomb-making laboratories.
Amira’s cousin, 15-year-old Amid Amira, was also forced by the soldiers to search three houses, making him enter rooms, empty cupboards and open windows.
Israeli human rights group Yesh Din has reported that the Israeli army used peaceful Palestinian villages to carry out training exercises. The group said that the villagers were harassed and scared as two battalions of reservists acted out a battle in their midst for three hours. The exercises were carried out without warning in the early morning in the villages of Beit Lid and Safarin February 2007.
11-year-old girl, Jihan Dadush, said that soldiers took her from her home three days later, on February 28, forcing her to open the door of a neighboring apartment and enter ahead of them. The soldiers then returned her to her home.
In August 2002, a 19-year-old Palestinian student, Nidal Daraghmeh, was killed when troops in the West Bank town of Tubas forced him to knock on the door of a neighbouring building where a Hamas fugitive was hiding. Gunfire erupted and Daraghmeh was killed.
The reports show the violations of Israeli forces to the sanctity of homes and residential areas, and how they convert civilians’ homes into military barracks, risking the lives of many innocent people and putting them in the line of fire. And most important of all is terrifying children and subjecting them to the most inhumane experiences ever.
References:
The Mezan Center for Human Rights
The Guardian newspaper
The Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem.
http://www.btselem.org/english/human_shields/20060720_human_shields_in_beit_hanun.asp
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/mar/09/israel
Public Committee against Torture in Israel
Yesh Din for human rights
BBC
Human Rights News website
See also Lawrence of Cyberia
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