Sobbing and terrified, the 12-year-old Palestinian schoolboy says Israeli soldiers ordered him and his cousins to strip down to their underwear, before forcing them at gunpoint to act as “human shields”.
It was late December 2023 in the Tuffah neighbourhood of Gaza City that had become an epicentre of Israel’s ferocious assault on the strip, following Hamas’s 7 October attacks. After the Israeli military issued an evacuation order for the area, the male members of the families who lived in the same building left under heavy fire, searching for shelter.
That left only the women and children, cowering in their homes when a dozen soldiers raided the building, Shadi, whose name has been changed to protect his identity, tells The Independent.
“We were so scared when they entered, we were screaming as we tried to run from room to room to hide,” says the seventh-grade student, now 13 years old, who still has vivid nightmares that soldiers will take him, and is often too scared to go to the toilet on his own.
“They took a group of us, me and my cousins, blindfolded us and tied our hands. I was terrified. I was shaking with fear. My mother was crying but couldn’t do anything. They were standing over us with their guns.”
By phone, The Independent spoke to two of the boys, who were aged between 11 and 16 years old, and their parents, who say they were beaten, threatened with dogs and stripped to their boxer shorts despite the freezing winter conditions.
“They took us and put us on the road in front of their vehicles and then asked us if we knew any of the [Palestinian militants] to tell them we are here,” says another of the boys, Ahmed, whose name has also been changed.
Ahmed, Shadi’s 16-year-old cousin, says the boys were beaten multiple times and attacked with the dogs before being forced to walk in front of the soldiers, sweeping the houses looking for militants from Gaza’s armed factions.
“We were blindfolded and our hands were tied behind our backs. They were pushing us to go here, saying go right, go left, open this door, go in there,” Shadi continues.
“We were so scared that we might be killed at any second. They were beating us with their weapons telling us to keep moving.” When asked about these testimonies, the Israeli military said “the orders and directives of the IDF prohibit the use of Gazan civilians captured in the field for military missions that endanger them”.
But a third civilian The Independent interviewed, a 20-year-old internally displaced man from north Gaza, describes being arbitrarily detained alongside more than a dozen Palestinians in June, and says he was forced to inspect houses and roads over 15 “missions” during a two-week period. He says he was nearly killed as he was forced to wear an Israeli military uniform and a camera on his chest, and so narrowly escaped being shot by the Palestinian side.
He describes how, in groups of two or three, Palestinian civilians would be forced to sweep houses and roads, searching for tunnels, 100m in front of the soldiers, who directed them via microphone on military quadcopters.
The use of civilians as human shields by military forces is prohibited in the Geneva Conventions and is a war crime.
“‘Human shielding’ refers to purposefully using the presence of civilians to render military forces or areas immune from attack,” explains Belkis Wille, of Human Rights Watch.
“The laws of war prohibit using civilians to shield military objectives, including individual combatants, from attack.”
When contacted by The Independent, the Israeli military said the claims of the use of human shields had been forwarded for examination by the relevant authorities, without elaborating any further. They declined to comment on whether there would be a specific investigation into the use of children. Israel has repeatedly accused Hamas, the militant group that rules Gaza, of using human shields.
Israel has launched its heaviest-ever bombardment of Gaza and instigated a crippling siege, in retaliation for bloody attacks on southern Israel by Hamas militants who killed more than 1,000 people and took more than 250 hostage, according to Israeli accounts.
Since then Palestinian health authorities say Israel’s bombing campaign and ground incursion has killed more than 40,000 people with as many as 10,000 more bodies buried under rubble.
The United Nations has reported that Israel has arbitrarily held thousands of Palestinians, including medical staff, patients and residents fleeing the conflict, as well as captured fighters. Many have been subjected to torture and mistreatment.
They made us wear cameras and army clothes
