This article seems similar to the legal justification of US torture of Iraqis at Abu Gharib and Gitmo made by W Bush/Cheney's Att Gen Alberto Gonzalez - who btw is the latest war criminal to endore Harris.
"Show me who your friends are and I'll know who YOU are!" By casting all the protected sites and people it has bombed as “shields,” Israel thus 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 <https://www.thenation.com/article/world/hamas-israel-war-gaza-vietnam/> to the war against ISIS <https://www.unhcr.org/uk/news/stories/civilians-living-penury-and-panic-mosul-battle-rages-unhcr>. However, the intensity and scope of how Israel has mobilized the human shields accusation in the past year is 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 <https://www.gov.il/en/pages/hamas-israel-conflict2023-key-legal-aspects> that “the mere fact that seeming ‘civilians’ or ‘civilian objects’ have been targeted” does not mean “that an attack was unlawful,” since these seeming civilians or civilian objects may actually have been human shields. The rationale here is that Palestinian homes are not homes, hospitals are not hospitals, mosques are not mosques, schools are not schools. They might “seem” to be, but they are not what they seem. Instead, each home is a suspected hideout, every 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, United Kingdom, Germany, France and Italy. This deadly logic has already justified unprecedented carnage <https://apnews.com/article/israel-gaza-bombs-destruction-death-toll-scope-419488c511f83c85baea22458472a796>. Israel killed more civilians and destroyed more civilian infrastructure in the first three months of its campaign in Gaza than Assad’s regime did in Aleppo and Russian forces did in Ukraine over years. It has, proportionally speaking, wreaked more damage than the Allied bombing of Germany in World War II, destroying or damaging 70% of the Strip’s civilian infrastructure and rendering neighborhood after neighborhood uninhabitable. Furthermore, 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 make it more humane—to the opposite effect, essentially carving out a legal justification for genocide. Israel’s ongoing war on Gaza has accelerated these dynamics. Because Hamas has built <https://apnews.com/article/israel-hamas-unwra-gaza-tunnels-31f6ca23365e349bcde1332d5028e431> 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 <https://www.icj-cij.org/sites/default/files/case-related/192/192-20240112-ora-01-00-bi.pdf> 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 international press very amenable to the narrative that “savage” Palestinian militants are using their own people as fodder. Recently, for instance, Israel killed <https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2024/7/13/israeli-air-raid-on-al-mawasi-kills-90-people-what-we-know-so-far> almost 100 civilians in a single attack purportedly targeting Hamas’s military chief Mohammed Deif. The bombing took place in a zone that Israel itself had designated as a “humanitarian area”; however, the military still portrayed <https://x.com/IDF/status/1812093008319267038> the strike as a legitimate attack against “terrorists hiding among civilians,” and Western media outlets did not <https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/07/13/israel-hamas-war-news-gaza-deif-mawasi/> hesitate <https://www.axios.com/2024/07/13/israel-airstike-mohammed-deif-khan-younis> to <https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/to-target-a-top-militant-israel-rained-down-eight-tons-of-bombs-d04ae17b> follow suit <https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/07/13/world/israel-gaza-war-hamas> in describing the strike as one against Deif rather than displaced Palestinians. https://jewishcurrents.org/human-shields-gaza-israel-a-legal-justification-for-genocide -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. 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