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Israel has introduced a new form of human shielding in the ongoing genocide Gaza, one that appears unprecedented in the history of warfare. The practice was initially revealed in a brief June 2024 Arabic language report by Al Jazeera. That August, Haaretz published an entire exposé about how Israeli troops have abducted Palestinian civilians, dressed them in military uniforms, attached cameras to their bodies, and sent them into underground tunnels and buildings in order to shield Israeli troops from enemy fire. One Israeli soldier noted how Palestinian civilians have been made invisible through this tactic: “It’s hard to recognize them. They’re usually wearing Israeli army uniforms, many of them are in their 20s, and they’re always with Israeli soldiers of various ranks.” But if you look more closely, Haaretz’s journalists proceeded to explain, “you see that most of them are wearing sneakers, not army boots. And their hands are cuffed behind their backs, and their faces are full of fear.” While an Israeli military spokesperson denied that this was a well-established practice, claiming that “IDF instructions and orders prohibit the use of Gazan civilians caught in the field for military missions that pose a deliberate risk to their lives,” soldiers interviewed by Ha’aretz and the Israeli organisations Breaking the Silence reveal that human shields were systematically deployed across the Gaza Strip by a plethora of units and the highest brass were aware of the practice.
Neve Gordon, after teaching for seventeen years at Ben-Gurion University in Israel, joined the School of Law at Queen Mary University of London. Gordon is the author of Israel’s Occupation (University of California Press 2008) and co-author of The Human Right to Dominate (Oxford University Press, 2015), Human Shields: A History of People in the Line of Fire (University of California Press, 2020). He is a Fellow of the British Academy of Social Sciences and writes regularly for the popular press.
Nicola Perugini is Senior Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Edinburgh. He is the coauthor of The Human Right to Dominate (OUP 2015) and Human Shields: A History of People in the Line of Fire (2020). He is the co-editor of Palestine and the Western Academe Fighting the Exception, Defending Epistemic Justice (Routledge 2026). He is currently working on a research project which examines anticolonial liberation wars, international law, and the status of civilians in armed conflicts.
Israeli troops have used Palestinian civilians as human shields in previous rounds of violence in what the military calls “neighbour procedure”- the use of shields to get wanted people out of a house. In 2002 the Israeli Supreme Court ruled that the practice was “cruel and barbaric,” and prohibited its use. Despite this ruling, in the wars on Gaza (since 2008), Israeli units resumed the practice of using human shields but these shields always wore civilian clothes and could thus be identified as civilians. This serves to deter Palestinian fighters from attacking or firing at their own civilians and is central to the constitutive logic of human shielding as traditionally understood. It is precisely the recognition of their vulnerability, and of the fact that they are fellow Palestinians that makes human shielding an effective deterrent, the argument goes.
Human Bait
But what has happened in Gaza after 7 October 2023, is that, instead of exploiting the vulnerability of Palestinian civilians, the Israeli military has disguised them as enemy combatants: people who, according to the laws of armed conflict, can be killed without it being a crime. Israeli troops deploy Palestinian civilians as shields, not to deter Palestinian fighters from striking soldiers, but rather to deceive them and draw their fire. This in turn helps to reveal the fighters’ location, allowing the Israeli troops to launch a lethal counterattack and kill them.
The former defense minister and International Criminal Court fugitive Yoav Gallant’s racist assertion that “we are fighting human animals” exposes how, for Israeli soldiers, Palestinians are either prey or bait, animal or bare flesh. Like hunters who use raw meat to lure animals they wish to capture or kill, Israeli troops use Palestinian civilians as if they were flesh whose function is to attract the hunter’s prey.
The dehumanization that Israel has exercised against Palestinians for years has been a prelude to using civilians as human shields against the guerrilla tactics and underground warfare of Palestinian armed groups. To say it with Aimé Cesaire, violence in the colonies always take the shape of the “thingification” of the colonized. Colonial racism — the belief that the colonized can be transformed into an animal — is central to this unprecedented use of Palestinian humans as inanimate instruments of war to lure the enemy. Using Palestinians as objects of war in this way entirely removes the human element in the phrase “human shields.”
Simultaneous to this redefinition of the human shielding tactic, since 2023, Israel’s accusation of Palestinians using human shields has been dramatically extended to the charge of “population shielding” mobilizing legal articles relating to the protections of civilians and civilian objects from the 1949 Fourth Geneva Convention and the 1977 Additional Protocols to “camouflage” a war of annihilation.
Shielding as Logic of Total Destruction
On 27 October 2023, in advance of its first assault on al-Shifa — the largest hospital in the Gaza Strip — the Israeli military released an “Intelligence-based illustration video” depicting a three-dimensional model of the medical facility. The clip purported to show how Hamas was using the hospital as its “main headquarters”, with tunnels located directly underneath the medical wards serving as a base for the group’s military operations. Following the allegations that the entire hospital had been transformed into a shield, which were continuously reiterated by Israel’s military spokesperson and parroted by international media, Israeli forces raided al-Shifa on 15 November.
At the time the soldiers entered the hospital, at least 650 patients and 7,000 displaced Palestinians were still on the premises, but Israel claimed that these people were “human shields” for Hamas. The troops then proceeded to attack the facility and those within it, damaging the building housing the hospital’s surgical operation rooms, blowing up a warehouse storing medicine and medical equipment, blindfolding and interrogating hundreds before taking them to “unknown areas”, and shooting at anyone who tried to flee. Following the attack, the Palestinian Ministry of Health said that 179 bodies were found inside the compound. Israel used similar justifications to besiege the hospital yet again in March 2024, and by the end of that month, it had completely destroyed al-Shifa, transforming its grounds into a mass grave.
A Washington Post investigation revealed, however, that the evidence presented by the Israeli military falls well short of proving that Hamas had actually been misusing the hospital. Nonetheless, since 7 October, Israel has attacked healthcare facilities over nine hundred times, while also bombing and raiding Gaza’s refugee camps, houses, apartment buildings, schools, universities, mosques, cemeteries, and agricultural lands, all of which it claimed Hamas was using as “human shields”. The legal significance of the human shield accusation cannot be overstated. The moment a civilian or object is cast as a shield the means and methods of violence can be relaxed and the responsibility for the harm shifts from the attacking warring party to the party using civilians as shields. The logic is as follows: if an enemy uses civilians as shields, and civilians are killed or injured in an attack, the resulting harm is attributed to the original, illegal act of using them as shields.
The power of the human shields provisions to reassign guilt from one warring party to another is key to understanding why it has been incessantly invoked in numerous war zones. By casting all the protected sites and people it has bombed as “shields”, Israel puts forth a legal defense that seeks to shift the responsibility for its mass killings of civilians and sweeping destruction of civilian infrastructure onto Hamas, absolving itself of blame and legal accountability.
Israel is not alone in using the human shielding allegation to justify violence against civilians: this strategy has previously been seen in conflicts ranging from the Vietnam War to the war against ISIS as a means to reassign guilt from one warring party to another. However, the intensity and scope of how Israel has mobilized the human shields accusation since 2023 is arguably unprecedented. Parties alleging the use of human shields have typically restricted the charge to limited territorial areas. In contrast, Israel has cited Hamas’s underground tunnel system to cast every square inch of Gaza as a human shield. This apparently endless multiplication of the human shielding accusation has functioned to erase the possibility of Palestinian civilianness altogether. Indeed, Israel’s ministry of foreign affairs has argued that “the mere fact that seeming ‘civilians’ or ‘civilian objects’ have been targeted” does not mean “that an attack was unlawful”, since these apparent “civilians” or “civilian objects” may actually have been human shields. The rationale here is that Palestinian homes are not homes, Palestinian hospitals are not hospitals, Palestinian mosques are not mosques, and Palestinian schools are not schools. Instead, each home is a suspected hideout, each hospital a likely arms depot, each mosque a tunnel pier, every school a rocket launch platform — and all legitimate targets for the cutting-edge weaponry that Israel receives from the United States, Germany, United Kingdom, and France.
This deadly logic has already justified unprecedented carnage. The Israeli military has killed over 71,000 Palestinians in Gaza, of whom at least 20,000 were children. These conservative figures do not include an untold number of people lost under the rubble. More than 80 percent of the buildings in Gaza have been either damaged or destroyed, rendering neighbourhood after neighbourhood uninhabitable. Ninety percent of housing, 97 percent of schools, 33 of 36 hospitals, and all the universities have been hit by Israeli missiles. At least 1.9 million people across the Gaza Strip have been displaced, with over a million Palestinians currently living in squalid tents without electricity, running water, or a sewage system. The key point is that by deploying the shielding allegation at scale, Israel has created a way to use International humanitarian law—which is technically meant to regulate war and afford protections to civilians—to the opposite effect, essentially carving out a legal justification for genocide.
The Final Collapse of the “Rules Based Order”
Human shielding accusations have a long history. Initially, the scale of the human shielding allegation was limited, with warring parties charging that specific facilities, locations, or groups of people were being used as shields. But in the past two decades, we have witnessed a pivotal shift. In the 2008–2009 Sri Lankan Civil War, for instance, prominent legal scholars framed tens of thousands of civilians as human shields for the militant group, the Tamil Tigers, in order to justify government forces’ lethal violence against them. During the 2016 war against ISIS in Mosul, Iraq, United Nations agencies and Amnesty International characterized 100,000 civilians trapped in close proximity to the fighting as human shields. And starting in 2022, Russian leaders have repeatedly
justified the deaths of civilians in Ukraine by using the human shielding allegation. Russia’s Defense Ministry accused Ukrainian “militants” of holding “more than 4.5 million civilians hostage as human shields”, thus applying the shielding charge to a full ten percent of Ukraine’s population and positioning them as “not immune from attack” under international law. As these instances show, over time, civilians trapped in war zones have become more and more likely to be cast as shields, and increasingly likely to be stripped of legal protections as a result.
Israel’s ongoing war on Gaza has accelerated these dynamics. Because Hamas has built what are believed to be hundreds of miles of underground tunnels beneath Gaza as part of its guerrilla tactics, evading the eye of Israel’s high-tech surveillance apparatus, the Israeli legal team has invoked the laws of armed conflict to claim that all civilian objects—and every civilian—situated on Gaza’s land surface are potential human shields, and thus not immune from attack. The unprecedented nature of this shielding charge would appear to strain credulity; indeed, Western powers have never accepted similar claims advanced by Russia. However, as a US ally fighting non-white, non-state actors, Israel has found Western politicians and the international press very amenable to the narrative that “savage” Palestinian militants are using their own people as fodder.
Israel’s unprecedented broadening of the human shielding charge has been facilitated by its legal teams’ decades of experience in interpreting international law as if the exceptions were the rule. As recently as Israel’s 2021 and 2022 Gaza campaigns, the military duplicitously invoked the human shielding accusation to legitimize illegal airstrikes against civilians. Since 7 October, the same logic has been applied as justification for genocidal violence, including mass expulsions and killings.
Tellingly, Israel’s legal defence at the International Court of Justice has put the idea of human shields front and centre. In his opening statement, the attorney representing Israel noted that Gaza’s civilian infrastructure is actually “the most sophisticated terrorist stronghold in the history of urban warfare”, arguing that Hamas, not Israel, was responsible for the destruction of Gaza. The Israeli legal team returned to these arguments again and again. This represents the first time in history that human shielding, under the auspices of international law, has been used to carve out a justification for a colonial war of annihilation. The moment Israel invokes international law to frame everything above ground in Gaza as a potential shield, it operationalizes the law itself as a tool legitimizing genocide. It is hard to overstate the frightening consequences of this manoeuvre. In the aftermath of the Second World War, the “rules-based order” was created to regulate war according to humanitarian principles. If the international legal apparatus can be used to justify acts that can destroy a people, “in whole or in part”, this order already precarious order then becomes a tool for its own undoing.
