Palestinians inspect the massive damage caused by an Israeli airstrike on Al-Masry Tower in downtown Rafah in the Gaza Strip on March 9, 2024.Palestinians inspect the massive damage caused by an Israeli airstrike on Al-Masry Tower in downtown Rafah in the Gaza Strip on March 9, 2024.of any conflict since the 1994 Rwanda genocide.
too close to concentrations of civilians. However, this is not the same thing as deliberately using civilians as protection against enemy fire, which is a far more serious offense and recognized as a crime against humanity.has also been found to have positioned fighters and armaments too close to civilians, but the Biden administration has neither accused the state of using human shields nor used that to defend Russia’s bombing of civilian areas.
There is also the additional factor that such allegations serve the purposes of the far right Israeli government to largely destroy the Gaza Strip and possibly even engage in. The primary reason that so many in government, the media and elsewhere have been making such claims is that the U.S. government has redefined “human shields” well beyond the international legal definition.
Biden has expanded the definition even further, saying that simply the presence of Hamas in the Gaza Strip is responsible not only for the bombing, but for the Israeli blockade and resulting starvation of Palestinians. Addressing a Human Rights Campaign dinner in Washington,, “The humanitarian crisis in Gaza — innocent Palestinian families and the vast majority that have nothing to do with Hamas — they’re being used as human shields.
The ramifications of U.S. policy goes beyond Israel and Gaza. It has been used by U.S. officials to justify Israel’s bombing of civilians in Lebanon, even though there appeared to bethat Hezbollah has used human shields either. The claim of the use of human shields by Islamist movements has also been used byin Iraq and Syria which killed many thousands of civilians