Gaza (Quds News Network)- The Israeli Military Police is reportedly investigating six cases in which Israeli soldiers used Palestinian civilians as human shields during the assault on Gaza.
The Military Advocate General launched an investigation after a Red Cross report released in January highlighted the widely used phenomenon, Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported.
Reports emerged several times of the Israeli use of Palestinians as human shields, however, Haaretz said testimonies continued to emerge regarding the forces’ ongoing exploitation of civilians in Gaza, extending up until January when the Red Cross report was released.
Forced to Serve as Human Shield
The investigation also covers incidents involving Israeli soldiers along Gaza’s Netzarim Corridor. These incidents raise concerns that senior Israeli military officials adopted a policy of indiscriminate killing, routinely classifying civilian casualties as terrorists along the southern Gaza route, in violation of the laws of war and the Geneva Convention.
The Red Cross report includes testimonies from Palestinian civilians in Gaza who were forced into serving as human shields for soldiers during the assault. A number of these civilians reported being threatened that they and their families would face harm if they refused. Some accounts are supported by video footage and photographs that document the tasks they were forced to perform.
The investigative team found the testimonies credible in at least nine cases, documented between December 2023 and January 2025. A Haaretz investigation revealed that soldiers from multiple infantry units reported witnessing the practice in action. The report concluded that the Nahal, Givati, and Commando brigades were responsible for most of the verified incidents.
The Red Cross report says that the civilians endured violence and humiliation and were even denied food and water by the forces. Investigators noted one incident in which a civilian was shot in the back and wounded when he refused a soldier’s request to enter a compound suspected of being booby-trapped.
A similar pattern emerges in all the investigated cases regarding the use of civilians in Gaza: the soldiers abducted these Palestinians for periods ranging from days to weeks, forced them to participate in operations under threat, subjected them to physical and mental abuse, and then released them back to the Strip.
Some of these civilians were later arrested and transferred to Israel, while others were wounded during the operations. To date, it remains unclear whether any of them were killed. Initially, the civilians were ordered to set fire to residential buildings, apartments, and warehouses. At times, they were also ordered to enter the burning buildings to ensure the fire spread throughout. If the fire did not spread, their task was to ignite the entire structure.
As the war progressed, the use of the so-called Shawish practice became more prevalent. Soldiers refer to each of the Palestinians as shawish, an obscure Arabic term of Turkish origin that means “sergeant.”
The Palestinian civilians in Gaza, chosen at random by the soldiers, were also assigned to plant explosives in civilian buildings that the military sought to destroy, without protection or basic knowledge of explosive devices. At times, civilians were instructed to check for fighters or explosives in tunnels.
The civilians were also sent by soldiers to medical clinics, hospitals, and humanitarian aid facilities to report on potential fighters present there. The soldiers would dress them in medical staff uniforms and send them to these institutions.
In other incidents, civilians were ordered with documentation and photography duties in preparation for mapping buildings to be demolished. At times, they also served as interpreters and accompanied the forces while wearing army uniforms.
According to all the civilians who testified about the soldiers’ actions, the forces threatened them and their families if they refused to cooperate. During the time the soldiers spent in their apartments, the civilians were handcuffed and shackled, and their eyes were covered.
“Our Lives Are More Important”
According to a soldier who spoke to Haaretz in August, senior army officials “know that it’s not a one-time incident of a young and stupid company commander who decides on his own” to use a civilian. “It’s done with the knowledge of the brigade commander, at the least.”
Many soldiers felt uncomfortable with the practice, demanded answers and even protested loudly, but the commanders prevented any discussion of its moral implications.
“Our lives are more important than their lives,” the soldiers were told. One of them said that the commanders turned to one of the soldiers and told him, “You don’t agree that the lives of your friends are much more important than their lives? And isn’t it better that our friends will live and not be blown up by an explosive device, and that they get blown up by an explosive device?”
One soldier described how two civilians were brought to his unit: “About five months ago, two Palestinians were brought to us. One was 20 and the other was 16. We were told: ‘Use them, they’re Gazans, use them as human shields,'” he said.
According to the soldier, when one of his comrades raised the issue with the commander, the latter replied: “Don’t you agree that the lives of your comrades are far more important than their lives?”
Mosquito Protocol
In late October, CNN reported that Palestinians, among them teenagers, were said to have been forced to serve as human shields in Gaza. According to the report, the use of Palestinians as human shields has become known as “mosquito protocol” among Israeli soldiers.
The use of Palestinians as human shields didn’t begin on October 7. During Operation Defensive Shield, conducted in 2002 in the West Bank, the Israeli forces utilized the so-called “neighbor protocol,” in which soldiers used civilians to search homes for booby traps or sent Palestinians into homes ahead of Israeli forces to locate wanted individuals.
International law forbids the use of civilians to shield military activity, or to forcibly involve civilians in military operations.
After numerous stories on the issue were published, human rights groups petitioned Israel’s top court to stop the practice. The court accepted the petition in 2005 and ruled that the practice is against international law and is therefore illegal.
However, the practice seems to have returned more than 20 years later.
Nadav Weiman, a former Israeli sniper and now BTS director, said: “From what we understand it was a very widely used protocol, meaning there are hundreds of Palestinians in Gaza who have been used as human shields.
“Palestinians are being grabbed from humanitarian corridors inside Gaza … and then they’re being brought to different units inside Gaza – regular infantry units, not special forces.” Weiman said.
“And then those Palestinians are being used as human shields to sweep tunnels and also houses. In some cases, they have a GoPro camera on their chest or on their head and in almost all of the cases, they are cuffed before they are taken into a tunnel or house to sweep and they are dressed in IDF uniform.”
Bill van Esveld, Human Right Watch’s associate director for children’s rights in the Middle East and North Africa, said: “There is this repeated history of well documented accounts by UN bodies, as well as by human rights groups, and indications of Israeli awareness of the problem, but no action.”
“It’s no surprise that this longstanding problem would persist.”