Since the earliest days of the post–October 7 US/Israeli genocide in Gaza, corporate media outlets have claimed that Hamas uses Palestinian civilians as human shields. Protocol 1 of the Geneva Convention characterizes the practice thusly:
The presence or movements of the civilian population or individual civilians shall not be used to render certain points or areas immune from military operations, in particular in attempts to shield military objectives from attacks or to shield, favour or impede military operations.
In other words, when civilians are used to shield military targets, attacking those targets can be legal under international law, but the attacker, as Al Jazeera (11/13/23) noted, still has to adhere to
the principles of distinction and proportionality: An army has the duty to target only the enemy, even if this means facing greater risks to minimize civilian casualties; and to weigh the military value of each attack against the civilian casualties that are likely to result from it.
Stunning assertion
Jewish Currents (7/17/24): “By casting all the protected sites and people it has bombed as “shields,” Israel thus seeks to shift the responsibility for its mass killings of civilians and sweeping destruction of civilian infrastructure onto Hamas—absolving itself of blame and legal accountability.”
Israel and its backers, however, have completely distorted this concept, in an apparent attempt to give their massacres in Gaza a veneer of legality. The scholars Nicola Perugini and Neve Gordon (Jewish Currents, 7/17/24) explained how human shielding discourse has been misapplied to Gaza:
Parties alleging the use of human shields have typically restricted the charge to limited territorial areas; in contrast, Israel has cited Hamas’s underground tunnel system to cast every square inch of Gaza as a human shield. This apparently endless multiplication of the human shielding accusation has functioned to erase the possibility of Palestinian civilianness altogether.
This corruption of the meaning of “human shields” has distorted much of the corporate media coverage of the Gaza genocide. At the outset of the October 2023 escalation in Palestine, a Boston Globe article (10/8/23) asserted that Hamas “uses its own civilians as human shields against attacks. Israel warns civilians before it launches attacks and urges that they leave conflict zones.” This was a stunning assertion, given Israel’s prolific record of deliberately killing Palestinian noncombatants, which long predates October 7, 2023 (FAIR.org, 10/13/23).
The New York Times’ editorial board (10/16/23) flatly stated that “Hamas is using the people of Gaza as human shields against Israel’s bombing campaign,” without pointing to any source documenting a single instance of this practice.
The same was true of a piece that appeared a day later in the Wall Street Journal (10/17/23), which said that “Hamas uses the inhabitants of Gaza as human shields.” It described the group as employing a “human-shield strategy.”
Evidence on one side
Such claims have two major problems. One is the lack of evidence for them, and the other is the extensive evidence of Israel using Palestinian civilians as human shields.
Consider, for example, the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) report on Operation Cast Lead, Israel’s US-backed 2008–09 assault on Gaza. The UN’s fact-finding mission
found no evidence to suggest that Palestinian armed groups either directed civilians to areas where attacks were being launched or forced civilians to remain within the vicinity of the attacks.
The mission did, however, find credible allegations that “Israeli troops used Palestinian men as human shields whilst conducting house searches.”
The UNHRC’s report on Israel’s 2014 offensive in Gaza, Operation Protective Edge, fell short of saying that Hamas used Palestinians as human shields. The commission said it was “disturbed by” a “report” that a Hamas spokesperson said people in Gaza should go on their roofs as a way of “shielding their homes from attack.”
The document said that “although the call is directed to residents of Gaza, it can be seen and understood as an encouragement to Palestinian armed groups to use human shields.” That’s quite different from saying that Palestinian fighters actually did compel Palestinian civilians to act as human shields.
But the report said that that’s what Israel did:
The manner in which the Israeli soldiers forced Palestinian civilians to stand in windows, enter houses/underground areas and/or perform dangerous tasks of a military nature, constitutes a violation of the prohibition against the use of human shields.
An Amnesty International report (3/26/15) on Operation Protective Edge noted that
Israeli authorities have claimed that in a few incidents, the Hamas authorities or Palestinian fighters directed or physically coerced individual civilians in specific locations to shield combatants or military objectives. Amnesty International has not been able to corroborate the facts in any of these cases.
Another important context for the human shields issue comes from the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem (11/11/17). The organization says that, since Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza in 1967,
Israeli security forces Israeli security forces have repeatedly used Palestinians in the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip as human shields, ordering them to perform military tasks that risked their lives. As part of this policy, soldiers have ordered Palestinian civilians to remove suspicious objects from roads, to tell people to come out of their homes so the military can arrest them, to stand in front of soldiers while the latter shoot from behind them, and more. The Palestinian civilians were chosen at random for these tasks, and could not refuse the demand placed on them by armed soldiers.
This use of civilians is not an independent initiative by soldiers in the field, but the result of a decision made by senior military authorities.
‘Hamas command bunker’
By describing a raid on a hospital as an effort to “root out Hamas,” the Wall Street Journal (11/10/23) gave credence to unsubstantiated Israeli claims.
Over the course of the genocide in Gaza, corporate media have frequently ignored this body of evidence. The human shields propaganda arguably reached its apotheosis in the run-up to Israel’s November 2023 attack on Al-Shifa hospital, Gaza’s largest medical complex at the time, and during and after the assault.
A Wall Street Journal article (11/10/23) on the matter carried the headline “Israeli Forces Race to Root Out Hamas,” with the subhead “Israeli forces face one of their toughest challenges as they converge on strip’s largest hospital.” Taken together, these phrases imply that Al-Shifa has a Hamas presence that ought to be “rooted out.” The piece said that Israeli
troops have converged in the past day on the sprawling facility, which Israel contends holds a major Hamas command bunker underneath the complex, a claim Hamas has denied.
At no point did the authors mention that Israel had presented no credible evidence in support of these allegations (FAIR.org, 12/1/23).
A New York Times report (11/15/23) said that
Israel maintains that Hamas built a military command center at the hospital, using its patients and staff as human shields.
The seizure of Al-Shifa, along with whatever evidence the Israelis produce of Hamas’s military presence there, could affect international sentiment about the invasion, as well as the continuing negotiations to free the hostages captured by Hamas last month.
This passage suggests that the question is what type of evidence Israel will provide of Hamas’s supposed operations at Al-Shifa, rather than whether it has any convincing evidence at all. The piece opted to present the supposed command center as a “he said, she said” narrative, but Hamas reportedly said that they were “prepared for an international delegation to conduct a search of the hospitals and their grounds for evidence of such alleged underground tunnels and command centers” (Mondoweiss, 11/13/23).
‘A deadly lie’
Human Rights Watch (11/14/23) found that “no evidence put forward would justify depriving hospitals and ambulances of their protected status under international humanitarian law.”
Meanwhile, medical staff at the hospital denied that there was a Hamas command center under the facility (Guardian, 11/14/23). Human Rights Watch (11/14/23), for its part, said:
The Israeli military on October 27 claimed that “Hamas uses hospitals as terror infrastructures,” publishing footage alleging that Hamas was operating from Gaza’s largest hospital, Al-Shifa. Israel also alleged that Hamas was using the Indonesian Hospital to hide an underground command and control center and that they had deployed a rocket launchpad 75 meters from the hospital.
These claims are contested. Human Rights Watch has not been able to corroborate them, nor seen any information that would justify attacks on Gaza hospitals.
Nevertheless, a subsequent CNN (11/17/23) report took the “shrug and say, ‘gee, golly, we just don’t know’” approach:
Israel points to the hospital as an example of Hamas’ use of civilians as human shields.
Since launching an operation at Al-Shifa this week, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) claimed it found a tunnel shaft and military equipment, but it has not yet shown proof of a large-scale command and control center. Hamas denies the allegations. CNN has not verified the claims of either Israel or Hamas.
CNN may not have been unable to verify either party’s claims, but they do their audience no favors by leaving out Human Right Watch’s remarks, or the following from Katrina Penney (Otago Daily Times, 11/16/23), a representative of MSF, which had personnel working at Al-Shifa:
We have seen no evidence that the hospital buildings or the compounds are being used by Hamas as a military base. In fact to the contrary; the hospital facilities have been trying to treat patients and trying to shelter civilians and their families at levels far beyond their capacity.
Excluding such testimonials gave Israel’s “command center” and “human shields” arguments unwarranted credibility. In contrast to CNN, Maureen Clare Murphy (Electronic Intifada, 11/15/23) offered a much sharper assessment of the available evidence, writing that
Israel’s own propaganda published in the aftermath of the raid shows that Netanyahu and the military’s longstanding accusation that Hamas uses Al-Shifa to shield its command center is a deadly lie.
But such honesty and precision is generally too much to ask of corporate media.
‘A sub-army of slaves’
To establish the “truth” that Hamas uses human shields, Washington Post columnist James Willick (11/14/23) quotes a Post editorial (11/5/23) criticizing Hamas for “provoking Israel militarily—while protecting its own leaders and fighters in tunnels.” By this logic, any non-suicidal military operation against Israel would involve “human shields.”
This dismal coverage of the human shields question was not limited to the reporting on Al-Shifa. Throughout the genocide, corporate media have often treated the idea that Hamas routinely uses Palestinian civilians as human shields as an established fact, while pretending that Israel doesn’t do exactly that.
Nor have media offered any proof of Hamas engaging in this practice in the post–October 7 US/Israeli rampage, as in an in-house Washington Post column (11/14/23) by Jason Willick, headlined “We Can’t Ignore the Truth That Hamas Uses Human Shields.” Hamas, he said, was “trying to increase” the number of dead Palestinian civilians.
A Newsweek op-ed (5/23/24) from Fordham University philosophy professor John Davenport referred to what he called “the stark fact” that Hamas uses “ordinary Palestinians as ‘human shields.’” While voluminous evidence of US/Israeli crimes throughout the genocide was readily available (Middle East Eye, 10/20/23, 5/16/24), Willick and Davenport failed to marshal a single report from the UN or an NGO that substantiated their claim that Hamas uses Palestinians as human shields.
Meanwhile, the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor (7/1/24) said that, in the months since October 7, “the Israeli army’s use of Palestinian civilians as human shields has been documented on a large scale.” Haaretz (8/13/24) reported that “random Palestinians have been used by Israeli army units in the Gaza Strip for one purpose: to serve as human shields for soldiers during operations.”
Still, US media commentators like Bret Stephens (New York Times, 9/3/24) and the Journal’s editorial board (10/7/24) were more interested in making uncorroborated claims that Hamas uses Palestinians as human shields than in discussing Israel’s widespread, confirmed use of the practice.
More recently, Haaretz (3/30/25) ran an article by an anonymous senior officer in the Israeli military detailing how “in Gaza, human shields are used by Israeli soldiers at least six times a day.” The officer explains how no infantry force in the Israeli military goes into a house in Gaza before a human shield clears it, which means “there are four [human shields] in a company, 12 in a battalion and at least 36 in a brigade. We operate a sub-army of slaves.”
Blaming Palestinians for their own deaths
Reuters (4/6/25) allowed a National Security Council spokesperson to claim without contradiction that aid workers killed by Israel were “human shields for terrorism.”
Even after Haaretz published this account, the New York Times ran an op-ed (4/6/25) asserting that Hamas uses Palestinian civilians as “human shields,” as if it were Hamas that kept a slave army of Palestinians for this purpose.
Similarly, a Reuters report (4/6/25) on Israel’s March 23 massacre of 15 paramedics quoted US National Security Council spokesperson Brian Hughes, “Hamas uses ambulances and more broadly human shields for terrorism.” The piece didn’t bother pointing to the lack of proof for Hughes’ claim, nor did it inform readers that Israel uses Palestinians as human shields on a daily basis.
In the same vein, an NBC News piece (4/7/25) on the paramedics atrocity included the sentence, “The White House on Sunday said Trump held Hamas responsible for the incident because Hamas uses ambulances and ‘human shields.’” Nothing in the article cast doubt on this unsubstantiated assertion, or noted that a senior Israeli military officer had just acknowledged (Haaretz, 3/30/25) that
the highest-ranking personnel on the ground have known about the [Israeli military’s] use of [Palestinians as] human shields for more than a year, and no one has tried to stop it.
To suggest that a meaningful portion of the Palestinians killed in Gaza can be attributed to Hamas using them as human shields—lack of evidence be damned—is to blame Palestinians for their own deaths, while reducing US/Israeli responsibility for the slaughter.
The canard also demonizes Hamas, painting its leaders as brutal savages with no regard for any human life. That in turn rationalizes the US/Israeli assault on Gaza; the narrative suggests that Hamas are so brutal toward their own people that one should cheer for Israel to eradicate them, not only for Israel’s benefit, but ultimately for the Palestinians’—even at the cost of leveling Gaza and exterminating its people.