AhlulBayt News Agency (ABNA): The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) is calling on the US Justice and State departments to investigate recent reports of Israel using Palestinians as human shields in the enclave.
“The State Department and the Department of Justice must investigate these credible charges of widespread and systematic human rights abuses by military forces that receive weapons paid for by American taxpayers and used against a civilian population,” CAIR’s executive director, Nihad Awad, said in a statement.
“These abuses, and the obvious and open ethnic cleansing of Gaza, violate our nation’s laws.”
The US provides Israel with at least $3.8bn in military aid annually, and the Biden administration has authorized $14bn in further assistance to its ally to help fund the ongoing war.
Neve Gordon a Professor of International Law at Queen Mary University of London writes on Al Jazeera: Israel has managed to introduce a new form of shielding in Gaza, one that appears unprecedented in the history of warfare. In the past, Israeli troops have used robots and trained dogs with cameras on their collars as well as Palestinian civilians to serve as shields. However, Palestinians who were used as shields always wore civilian clothes and thus could be identified as civilians. By dressing Palestinian civilians in military garb and sending them into the tunnels, the Israeli military has, in effect, altered the very logic of human shielding."
"By dressing Palestinian civilians in Israeli military uniforms and casting them as combatants the Israeli military purposefully conceals their vulnerability. It deploys them as shields not to deter Palestinian fighters from striking Israeli soldiers, but rather to draw their fire and thus reveal their location, allowing the Israeli troops to launch a counterattack and kill the fighters. The moment these human shields, masked as soldiers, are sent into the tunnels, they are transformed from vulnerable civilians into fodder," he said, adding "The Israeli army’s treatment of Palestinian civilians as expendable might not come as a surprise given the racialized form of colonial governance to which they have been subjected for decades. The deep-seated racism explains the ease with which Israeli President Isaac Herzog publicly claimed that there are “no innocent civilians” in the Gaza Strip as well as the prevailing indifference among Israel’s Jewish public to the tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians who have been killed."
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