“Human Shields” is latest propaganda to justify Palestinian atrocities
By repeating Israel and U.S. lies that Hamas uses human shields, the corporate media enable the genocide of Gaza.
Nearly everything the Biden White House says about Gaza is a lie.
There is no Israel-Hamas War. There is Israeli genocide of Palestinians that has killed more than 11,000 people, including 4,500 children.
The Biden administration is not powerless to stop Israeli atrocities as the New York Times and Washington Post report. The media ignore that Biden is speeding thousands of bombs and missiles to Israel to carry out those atrocities — without conditions. The media ignore Biden’s call for $14 billion of military aid to Israel would have U.S. taxpayers foot more than half the cost of the war. They ignore that the U.S. vetoes any U.N. resolution critical of Israel. And they ignore that Biden has dispatched two aircraft carrier armadas and a nuclear submarine bristling with cruise missiles to give Israel cover so it can slaughter thousands of civilians.
The latest lie, a retread of an old Israeli lie, is Hamas uses civilians as human shields. This is one of the main talking points of the Biden administration, and the corporate media treat it as fact.
It’s not a lie for the sake of a lie, however. There is a sinister strategy behind it. In effect, the U.S. and Israel define all Palestinians as human shields. Once all civilians are turned into human shields, then it is impossible for Israel to deliberately kill any civilians.
No matter how many civilians Israel kills, the White House claims “it’s ‘obvious to us’ that Israel is ‘trying to minimize’ civilian casualties.” That statement was made Nov. 1, by which point Israel had killed 6,400 children, women, and elderly in Gaza. How can this slaughter be reconciled with Israel minimizing civilian deaths? Simple. Hamas is to blame as they were human shields.
Justifying Genocide
As soon as Israel began its war on Gaza, the White House began its atrocity denial. Three days after Hamas attacked Israel Oct. 7, Biden said, “Hamas offers nothing but terror and bloodshed with no regard to who pays the price” by using “Palestinian civilians as human shields.”
On Oct. 15, U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken gave the thumbs-up to genocide, describing all of Gaza as a legitimate target. Blinken said Hamas was “using the Palestinians of Gaza as human shields” by making sure “that all of its critical leaders, that its command centers, that its weapons, its ammunitions are all located in residential areas in residential buildings or buried underneath hospitals, schools, and supermarkets.”
On Oct. 29, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan also accused Hamas of using civilians as human shields by “putting rockets and other terrorist infrastructure in civilian areas.”
On Nov. 9, two White House officials testifying before Congress repeated the human shield lie. Remarkably, they also admitted the death toll is “very possible … even higher than is being reported” by the Gaza health ministry. That contradicted another Biden lie that the ministry’s figures can’t be trusted. Human rights groups and U.N. agencies such as UNICEF criticized Biden. It expressed confidence in the data, saying its numbers in the past were “almost identical” to those from the health ministry.
European officials, lap dogs to U.S. power, repeat the charges about human shields.
The only human shields are White House officials shielding Israel from international justice. The corporate media legitimize atrocity denialism by treating U.S. and Israeli propaganda as credible. The media may say Israeli claims cannot be verified, but they never critique the claims.
Like A Nuclear Bomb
Take one outlandish claim. On Nov. 10 Israel said it had struck “15,000 terror targets” in Gaza. Not one corporate outlet that printed that statement provided any context.
A little critique reveals the absurdity of this fact. Mondoweiss said, “Israel claims that each and every one of these bombings targets members of Hamas.” Yet noting that Israel had killed 11,078 Palestinians by Nov. 1o, nearly 70 percent children and women, and 501 families had lost six or more members — would mean “the entire discourse on the so-called ‘military targets’ of its bombings simply collapses,” said Mondoweiss.
The scale of destruction is worse than the death toll indicates. It does not include an estimated 3,250 missing Palestinians who are likely dead “trapped under the rubble.” Israel has also damaged or destroyed 45 percent of homes in Gaza, 285 educational institutions, 11 bakeries, 135 healthcare facilities, and 73 mosques and churches. Israel has devastated communications, internet, mobile phones, water, and sanitation facilities.
Other data shows the Israeli war is indiscriminate and criminal. The Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor said Nov. 2, “Israel hits Gaza Strip with the equivalent of two nuclear bombs.” By then Israel had pummeled Gaza with 25,000 tons of explosives, nearly a thousand tons a day. That is at least 1.5 times the explosive power of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945. Gaza, however, is less than half the area of Hiroshima, and the bombing has obliterated 36 percent of Northern Gaza. Euro-Med added Israel is using “banned weapons” like phosphorous and cluster bombs while also dropping “highly explosive bombs in densely populated areas.”
In rare instances where the media admit Israel killed civilians, they are brushed aside as collateral damage from Israel trying to kill Hamas commanders, militants, or dismantle its terrorist infrastructure. The media don’t report what the world can see — Israel is trying to exterminate Palestinian life in Gaza. They report propaganda about an Israel-Hamas war, about crossfire, about firefights that deny any and all responsibility to the massacre to Israel.
New York Times Lies, Palestinians Die
As the “paper of record, the New York Times excels at justifying atrocities. When Israel bombed the Jabaliya neighborhood over three days. Reuters reported Israeli claims that it killed two Hamas commanders. Reuters also reported Israel claiming, “Hamas deliberately builds its terror infrastructure under, around and within civilian buildings, intentionally endangering Gazan civilians,” while adding the U.N. said the bombing “could be a war crime.”
While seemingly neutral, Reuters leaves out the context of a one-way war waged on Gazan civilians by one of the most powerful and ruthless militaries in the world.
But this is stellar reporting compared to the New York Times. Its account strips out attribution to Israel or mention that the killing of a Hamas commander is unconfirmed. It states without evidence that “Hamas has used civilians as human shields and positioned underground bunkers, weapon depots and rocket launchers under or near schools, mosques and hospitals.”
The Times reports other unsubstantiated Israeli claims as fact: “In late October, Israeli fighter jets targeted a tunnel network under Jabaliya, a densely populated neighborhood, killing a central figure in Hamas’s Oct. 7 terrorist attacks. But local officials say dozens of civilians were also killed and hundreds were wounded in the strike.”
This is pro-atrocity propaganda. The Times gives no proof Hamas uses human shields. Saying dozens were killed violates the basic journalistic rule of favoring specificity. It only serves to downplay the documented toll of 195 people killed, 777 wounded, and 120 buried under the rubble. Given services have collapsed under Israel’s siege, there are few emergency personnel left to rescue anyone buried alive. This could mean over 300 Palestinians were massacred to kill two Hamas commanders. That is far more than dozens killed and utterly disproportionate for a baseless claim that could be merely an excuse to massacre civilians.
That the bombing may have been deliberate is implied by survivors, who the Times didn’t interview. This is even more egregious journalistic malpractice. The dead and survivors should be the center of the story, not claims by the force carrying out an illegal invasion.
If they were, Times readers might have heard survivors like the one who told Democracy Now, “The area has been completely destroyed. There are no Hamas fighters here. These are all civilians. They are all innocent people. No resistance here. There was a bakery here and houses. One of them had 100 people inside, and another had 50 people. This is destruction. This is a war against God and his prophet. It’s a war of extermination.”
In a separate story on Nov. 3, the Times feebly criticized the bombing. Even though the death toll of 195 Palestinians was known, it still said dozens killed. It mentioned Jabaliya is heavily populated, but not that it is one of the most densely populated areas in the world with more than 200,000 people per square mile, as The Economist found worth reporting.
The Times said bombing the densely populated camp raised “questions of proportionality,” without mentioned that a group of U.N. experts had already called the bombing of the Jabaliya neighborhood, “a brazen violation of international law – and a war crime.”
The Times mentioned Israel dropped 2,000-pound bombs on Jabaliya, but not that the bombs are so massive their kill radius can extend nearly half a mile.
The Times mentioned the discrepancy that Israel claimed one strike killed two different Hamas commanders. But the Times did not mention that IDF spin is full of false, fabricated, and dodgy information, such as claiming that the Palestinian rocket that magically killed 471 people at the al-Ahli Hospital on Oct. 17 came from two different launch sites according to Israel.
What Is a Human Shield?
The linchpin of reporting by the Times, Reuters, and others is to treat Israeli and U.S. claims that Hamas uses human shields as credible. Western media are so lazy or so submissive to U.S. power, take your pick, they can’t be bothered to google the proper definition of human shield.
The International Committee of the Red Cross’s definition of human shields is based on the Third and Fourth Geneva Conventions, statutes of the International Criminal Court, and military manuals from countries such as Great Britain and New Zealand. The ICRC concludes “that the use of human shields requires an intentional co-location of military objectives and civilians or persons hors de combat with the specific intent of trying to prevent the targeting of those military objectives.” (Hors de combat means wounded or incapacitated soldiers who are not allowed to be attacked or harmed as they pose no threat.)
For Israel to legitimately target civilians in Gaza, it has to prove Hamas intentionally positioned military units “with the specific intent to prevent the targeting” of those units. But even then Israel must give warnings, allow time and safe opportunity to evacuate, and if there is any doubt it must assume the position is protected. Even if all these requirements are met, proportionality is required, meaning militaries can’t slaughter innocents to allegedly kill one military figure.
The past is also a guide as the hollowness of Israeli claims, which is completely absent from the media discussion. Amnesty International examined numerous Israeli claims about human shields during its 2014 war when it massacred 2,251 Palestinians in Gaza. Relying on the Red Cross definition of human shields, Amnesty said “Israeli authorities repeatedly stated that Hamas used … human shields” in Gaza, but found no evidence of human shields.
In addition to debunking Israeli propaganda, Amnesty said even if Hamas used human shields, that does “not relieve Israel of its obligation to take all necessary precautions to minimize harm to civilians.”
In effect New York Times regurgitated fake news to justify Israel’s massacre of hundreds of civilians in Jabaliya. The lack of verification or proper sourcing would embarrass a high-school newspaper.
But it is hardly alone. CBS News treated Israeli propaganda about human shields as news, and falsely stated “Hamas’ use of civilians as human shields in Gaza was confirmed … in 2014.” CBS even blamed Hamas for the deaths of 99 U.N. personnel killed by Israeli bombardment based on unsubstantiated claims by Israeli officials.
The Guardian published a notably awful report about human shields, which isn’t easy as there is no lack of poor reporting. Its reporter Peter Beaumont said footage of interrogation of Hamas POWs from Israel’s Shin Bet, notorious for torture, “appeared to confirm” Hamas using hospitals to hide tunnels because they know Israeli’s “won’t strike them.”
The Guardian destroys it credibility by using propaganda footage of prisoners of wars without any context or critique. The Hamas confession is ludicrous. They know well that Israel violates rules of war with impunity. Israel’s Dahiya Doctrine calls for disproportionate attacks on civilians — an explicit war crime. The policy is so well known, Thomas Friedman last month approvingly described how Israel “pounded” the Dahiya suburb of Beirut for 34 days in 2006 so that “Hezbollah’s leaders and their families and neighbors paid a very personal price.”
For Beaumont, The Guardian’s man in Jerusalem, to act ignorant of the Dahiya Doctrine is laughable. But he is not done embarrassing himself. Beaumont implies calls by Gaza’s Interior Ministry for Palestinians to ignore Israel’s demands to evacuate is a war crime when in fact the Israeli calls have been widely denounced as war crimes of forced displacement.
Then Beaumont says “Hamas and other factions” are guilty of using civilian facilities because The Guardian saw “armed men” in a Gaza hospital nine years ago and “senior Hamas leaders” in a hospital as well in the past.
Beaumont doesn’t realize neither act violates the rules of war. The ICRC says armed forces in a hospital by themselves don’t violate the rule of law. They have to be able-bodied combatants or the hospital is being used as a weapons depot or to launch attacks, none of which he described.
As for senior Hamas leaders, Beaumont has adopted the Israeli mentality that all one has to do is yell “Hamas” and therefore anyone and anything in Gaza can be bombed, shot, starved into oblivion.
The primary responsibility for the genocide of Gaza is with Israeli and U.S. officials. But Western media are doing all they can to assist them, and they deserve to be tried as willing accomplices of genocide.