TITLE: Haaretz Investigation: Israeli Army Uses Palestinian Civilians to Inspect Potentially Booby-trapped Tunnels in Gaza
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2024-08-13/ty-article-magazine/.premium/idf-uses-gazan-civilians-as-human-shields-to-inspect-potentially-booby-trapped-tunnels/00000191-4c84-d7fd-a7f5-7db6b99e0000
This story is paywalled, but it has been repeatedly re-reported, particularly in the Middle East’s news media. Of course, it has not yet broken through into the US news media and, frankly, it is unlikely to get picked up by the “mainstream” media at all … much like Ha’aretz’s shocking, but ignored report on the IDF’s specious, international law-defying rules of engagement.
I could’ve used the write-up by The Times Of Israel, but I felt the story was more effectively summed-up and contextualized by Responsible Statecraft, which stands out as an alternative, US-based source covering all things war.
TITLE: Report: Israelis using Gaza civilians as human shields
https://responsiblestatecraft.org/israelis-using-palestinians-human-shields/
EXCERPT: The Israeli Defense Forces have been targeting civilian centers and using Palestinian civilians as human shields during its operation in Gaza, according to explosive new reporting from Haaretz.
Ironically, this comes the day after the 75th anniversary of the Geneva Convention, a groundbreaking series of treaties which established international laws around human rights during war time.
The report also arrives after weeks of the Israeli military bombing schools in Gaza used by Palestinians for shelter. In each of the attacks, the IDF has claimed that Hamas was using civilians as human shields. In Haaretz’s new investigation however, Israeli soldiers have been seen using “random Palestinians” as human shields on camera for operations in the Strip. This is based in part on the footage, published by Al Jazeera two months ago, which shows Palestinians being forced into buildings and rooms ahead of soldiers to ensure that IDF are kept out of harm's way.
Video shows the soldiers placing body cameras on the handcuffed detainees and dressing them in military uniforms with protective vests as they are forced to enter tunnels and buildings before the Israeli soldiers, as a way to check for explosives. Further investigation by Haaretz, published on Tuesday, exposes just how widespread this practice may be among the IDF ranks in Gaza. Combat soldiers and commanders alike were interviewed during this investigation.
"Our lives are more important than their lives," soldiers were told, according to Haaretz. “The thinking is that it's better for the Israeli soldiers to remain alive and for the shawishim to be the ones blown up by an explosive device.”
One of the sources interviewed by the paper claimed that the practice of using Palestinians as human shields was well-known, saying “when I saw the report from Al Jazeera, I said: ‘Ah, yes, it’s true.’” They also charged that leadership knew about the practice adding, “it’s done with the knowledge of the brigade commander, at the least.” Another soldier added to the testimony saying, “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.’”
According to sources, minors and the elderly are also used. One soldier said, “There were times when really old people were made to go into houses.”
The list of incidents described in the investigation took place all over Gaza, but were very similar in nature and description, giving credence to the stories. Some soldiers said they felt uneasy about what they were doing, but concerns brought to leadership were met with a wave of the hand. A battalion commander is reported as saying in response to soldiers' questions: “A soldier doesn’t need to take an interest in the laws of war. You need to think about the IDF’s values and act according to the IDF’s values, not the laws of war.”
TITLE: Israeli strikes on Gaza leave children without parents and parents without children
https://apnews.com/article/israel-palestinians-hamas-war-gaza-orphans-strikes-36c11d9bb2c01b094e4301bf4e197f0b
EXCERPTS: Reem Abu Hayyah, just three months old, was the only member of her family to survive an Israeli airstrike in the Gaza Strip late Monday. A few miles (kilometers) to the north, Mohamed Abuel-Qomasan lost his wife and their twin babies — just four days old — in another strike.
More than 10 months into its war with Hamas, Israel’s relentless bombardment of the isolated territory has wiped out extended families. It has left parents without children and children without parents or siblings.
And some of the sole survivors are so young they will have no memory of those they lost.
The Israeli strike late Monday destroyed a home near the southern city of Khan Younis, killing 10 people. The dead included Abu Hayyah’s parents and five siblings, ranging in age from 5 to 12, as well as the parents of three other children. All four children were wounded in the strike.
“There is no one left except this baby,” said her aunt, Soad Abu Hayyah. “Since this morning, we have been trying to feed her formula, but she does not accept it, because she is used to her mother’s milk.”
The strike that killed Abuel-Qomasan’s wife and newborns — a boy, Asser, and a girl, Ayssel — also killed the twins’ maternal grandmother. As he sat in a hospital, stunned into near-silence by the loss, he held up the twins’ birth certificates.
His wife, Joumana Arafa, a pharmacist, had given birth by cesarean section four days ago and announced the twins’ arrival on Facebook. On Tuesday, he had gone to register the births at a local government office. While he was there, neighbors called to say the home where he was sheltering, near the central city of Deir al-Balah, had been bombed.
“I don’t know what happened,” he said. “I am told it was a shell that hit the house.”
The Israeli military did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the strikes.
The Health Ministry in Gaza said 115 newborns have been killed in the territory since the war began. Israel’s offensive has [also] left thousands of orphans — so many that local doctors employ an acronym when registering them: WCNSF, or “wounded child, no surviving family.” The United Nations estimated in February that some 17,000 children in Gaza are now unaccompanied, and the number is likely to have grown since.
The military says it tries to avoid harming Palestinian civilians, and blames their deaths on Hamas because the militants operate in dense residential areas, sometimes sheltering in and launching attacks from homes, schools, mosques and other civilian buildings.
But the army rarely comments on individual strikes, which often kill women and children.
TITLE: Disease was spreading in Gaza. Now there’s polio in the sewage.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/08/13/gaza-polio-sewage-disease-world-health-organization/
EXCERPTS: Packed into squalid tent camps and apartment buildings in Gaza, where Israel’s war against Hamas has leveled health and sanitation infrastructure, Palestinians are being overwhelmed by sickness. A lack of soap, potable water, clean clothes and access to toilets among the displaced means hepatitis A and other communicable diseases are on the rise. Doctors have also recorded likely cases of scabies, mumps, measles and meningitis, according to health-care workers and a United Nations disease surveillance database.
Now, the World Health Organization has warned that poliovirus is probably spreading in Gaza, after a vaccine-derived variant was detected last month in six sewage samples in the southern and central regions. “The detection of polio in wastewater in Gaza is a tell-tale sign that the virus has been circulating in the community, putting
unvaccinated children at risk,” WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said last week on X.
Poliovirus is spread through contaminated food or water, as well as contact with infected feces. In the most severe cases, it can cause paralysis, trouble breathing and even death, including in children, who are the most vulnerable to the disease.
Ten months of Israeli airstrikes and ground fighting have damaged or destroyed water pipelines, desalination plants, reservoirs and sewage treatment facilities, according to the U.N. Environment Program.
Gaza’s “water, sanitation, and hygiene systems are almost entirely defunct,” UNEP said in June in a preliminary report on the war’s toll on human health. “Gaza’s five wastewater treatment plants have shut down,” it said, “with sewage contaminating beaches, coastal waters, soil, and freshwater with a host of pathogens.”
In Gaza City alone, damage to sewage management systems is so extensive that it could take up to a year to fix even if fighting were to stop and reconstruction materials were allowed in, according to Mohammed Emam, director of the city’s wastewater department.
In the meantime, “it’s really hard to establish or reestablish the [sanitation] system while violence is ongoing,” Salim Oweis, a communications officer for UNICEF, the U.N. children’s agency, said by phone from Gaza. “Because that means that it can, at any point, get destroyed.”
SEE ALSO:
Gaza: “Only the dead have been spared this suffering”
https://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/latest/gaza-only-dead-have-been-spared-suffering