#human shields

Israel has spent decades telling the world that every civilian it kills was either a terrorist or a “human shield.”

But what does that claim mean when their soldiers execute paramedics and bury them in mass graves?

A new report reveals that on March 23, Israeli forces in Rafah killed 15 Palestinian medics and rescue workers in a series of deliberate attacks.

These were not combatants.

They were:

• Wearing medical vests

• Operating in clearly marked ambulances

• Killed one by one, not in a chaotic firefight

One was found with his hands tied behind his back, proof of an extrajudicial execution.

The IDF claims they fired on a “suspicious vehicle.” That lie evaporates under scrutiny: how do you explain the hand-tied medic?

This is not a one-off. The same army claims that Hamas uses “human shields,” while Israeli soldiers have been caught on video tying civilians to vehicles, forcing children into buildings, and following orders to use the “mosquito protocol” — IDF slang for sending Palestinian captives ahead to trigger traps. Even Haaretz now reports that nearly every IDF unit in Gaza used human shields as routine.

When the IDF kills doctors, aid workers, and children, they call it “self-defense.” When Palestinians die, they're retroactively labeled Hamas, or human shields, or “suspicious.”

This is how the narrative is manipulated: not with facts, but with framing that assumes every Palestinian is guilty by proximity.

So ask yourself: when the army claiming everyone it kills is a human shield is also the one executing medics, what credibility is left?

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/mar/31/israel-killed-15-palestinian-paramedics-and-rescue-workers-one-by-one-says-un

UPDATE: New York Times releases footage that clearly discredits the Israeli story

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/04/world/middleeast/gaza-israel-aid-workers-deaths-video.html

UPDATE UPDATE: Israel admits to ‘mistakenly firing on vehicles despite flashing headlights’

https://www.lbc.co.uk/world-news/israel-admits-mistakenly-killing-15-aid-workers-after-video-leak/

Materials submitted by soldiers’ friends confess that troops used kidnapped Palestinians, mostly elderly, as human shields on a daily basis.

When injured or exhausted, the victims were instructed to walk into designated killing zones to be gunned down by other units.

An Authentic Account of Hamas Using Civilians as Human Shields

Earlier today, on Eid al-Fitr, members of a Gazan family injured in an Israeli attack step out of an ambulance while cursing Hamas at the hospital entrance.

In the clip, the family members tell the cameras that Hamas operatives had been hiding next to them, which lead to the strike and placed them in immediate danger.

Not literal human shields in the legal sense, but this general sort of thing keeps happening, vaguely human-shield-shaped tactics of "Let's send sympathetic unarmed people in harm's way" which civilization seemingly hasn't settled on a good response to yet.

Agitator groups like the misleadingly-named National Lawyers Guild incite sympathetic-looking unarmed people to obstruct law enforcement, resist arrest, commit low-grade assault, and/or generally Pick Fights with cops (whether ICE, National Guard, or other kind), and then cops face the human-shield-like dilemma of:

yield to avoid hurting unarmed person

use violence against unarmed person

In normal circumstances, cops can use a mixed strategy and personal judgment. Sometimes #1 only has to be done once and the person calms down or leaves with a warning. Sometimes #2 resolves the situation nonlethally and nothing further comes of it.

But when organized agitators keep inciting people and repeat the dilemma at scale, escalating on one specific matter so the choice plays out again and again, where mixed strategy looks like inconsistency and the worst of both worlds, the options "evolve" into something worse:

Yield repeatedly. Eventually this forfeits the rule of law because demagogues can cheaply keep sending mediagenic pawns to veto law enforcement.

Use violence repeatedly. Eventually a sympathetic-looking unarmed person dies of law enforcement violence. Demagogues claim that this is murderous oppression.

In theory it's simple to say that #2 is the better response, violence against unarmed people is not inherently wrong and in a country of over three hundred million people there will inevitably be some casualties from law enforcement violence, this is statistics not malice, like how someone in America dies from falling out of bed every day (on average).

In practice, good luck explaining that to the people wailing that ICE murdered an unarmed mother of small children.

What would happen if it was blanket illegal?

Maybe Putin could adopt a war policy of strapping Moscovian children onto the outside of tanks and then roll those tanks into Ukraine to take Kyiv.

In this world, Ukraine would not be able to stop the tanks, because there are Russian children strapped to the tanks and striking the tanks would be illegal.

Putin could effectively take all of Europe this way.