LESLIE LONDON: Israel is hiding behind a ‘human shield’ smokescreen

David Benatar seeks to justify the unprecedented scale of killing of civilians in Gaza since the Israeli assault that followed the Hamas attack on southern Israel (“Free Gaza from Hamas”, December 14).

That Hamas committed a war crime by killing and kidnapping civilians on October 7 is in no doubt. But Israel’s response, which has denied an entire population access to water, food and medicines, and has led to more than 22,000 fatalities as well as the detention and torture of numerous civilians, including health workers (considered kidnapping by many) receives no such condemnation from Benatar.

Benatar’s justification of the civilian death toll in Gaza as “permissible if these are the unintended (but foreseen) effects of legitimate military strikes” is based on the foundational claim that the death toll is high because Hamas is using human shields in the conflict. This is an extremely problematic assumption from a scholar trained in moral philosophy, for a number of reasons. 

First, there is no evidence that Hamas is “using human shields” in this conflict to the extent that all 22,000 people who have died were human shields, or even some proportion of such were. How exactly are the deaths of women sheltering in a church compound to be interpreted as human shields, or the death in November of Ahmed Abbasi, head of Gift of the Givers operations in Gaza since 2013 while returning home from a morning prayer?

In the most infamous example of the human shield argument, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) claimed, in the lead-up to its siege and occupation, that al-Shifa Hospital housed an underground Hamas command centre. To date, no such evidence of any underground military command centre under the hospital has been produced. Instead, a staged display of weaponry was presented to the media by the IDF, which a BBC investigation found could not be verified as plausible.

Other than an endless stream of IDF and Israeli politician claims, replicated without question in international media, and statements by supposed Hamas operatives captured by Israel on carefully choreographed media releases, there is no evidence to back such claims. 

Rather, what we have is the conflation of urban warfare and the existence of tunnels in Gaza as “evidence” of human shielding. But the use of tunnels for purposes of war is not new and stems back to ancient times, used in China, Assyria, Rome and, more recently, in Korea, Vietnam and Iraq. Indeed, Jewish resistance fighters made use of tunnels in Warsaw in the heroic uprising against the Nazi occupation during World War 2.

Gaza City was one of the most densely populated cities in the world. The reason is not that Palestinians chose to live in such dense settlements but because Israeli expansion has confined Gazan Palestinians to the 365km² of the Gaza Strip. That tunnels are associated with urban residence is the result of a convergence between subterranean warfare and urban warfare, a phenomenon well recognised by scholars of international security. 

Moreover, as reported by the UN, more than 60% of Gaza’s housing units have been destroyed or damaged, 370 education facilities damaged, 11 bakeries destroyed, 23 hospitals and 53 healthcare centres put out of service, 104 ambulances and 20 water, sanitation and healthcare facilities damaged, and at least three churches and 120 mosques targeted. 

There is no logical connection between that scale of destruction above ground and any purported intent to neutralise underground tunnels used by combatants. And as we watch images of entire apartment blocks crumbling after Israeli bombing with the sickening realisation that people may be inside such a building we realise that, as Israeli academic Daphné Richemond-Barak has pointed out, “heightened constraints in urban terrain call for a rethinking of methods designed to detect and destroy tunnels, as many of the traditional methods may be devastating to civilians”.   

But heightened constraints are not what we have seen. In fact, a more likely explanation for extraordinary high level of civilian casualties in Gaza is a loosening of constraints by Israel in the current war, as suggested by an investigation by +972 Magazine and Local Call. This analysis suggests that, compared with previous military operations, the Israeli army has significantly expanded its bombing of targets that are not military in nature, including private residences, public buildings, infrastructure and high-rise blocks.

The aim is said to be to destabilise Palestinian civil society in the hope of pressuring Hamas. Military sources indicate that the IDF knows full well what the likely civilian kills are linked to each target and has made use of artificial intelligence to generate more potential targets than ever before.

The fact that three Israeli captives were killed when attempting to surrender to Israeli forces in Gaza is the clearest indication of the willingness of the IDF to dispense with restraints on civilian injuries. Indeed, the explanation proffered by the IDF in the Times of Israel indicated that soldiers had been told “the entire area was a combat zone” and soldiers were “allowed to open fire at anyone suspicious”. It is no wonder that Palestinian civilians are always deemed “suspicious” and their deaths are never mourned as an “unbearable tragedy” by the Israeli prime minister.

Moreover, in the occupied West Bank, where Hamas has no presence, the deaths of more than 340 Palestinians killed by Israeli forces and settlers since October cannot be explained by Hamas’ “human shielding”, but is rather the consequence of the devaluing of Palestinian lives.   

As researchers Neve Gordon and Nicola Perugini have shown, Israeli propaganda has consistently presented Hamas as making no ethical or normative distinction between civilians and combatants and therefore always using human shields. This characterisation, repeated without question in Benatar’s analysis, transforms the whole population into “killable subjects”.

Benatar’s timid qualifications that Israel does not have a “free pass to bomb and fire as it pleases”, ring hollow when we see hospitals, churches, child refuges and medical convoys bombed without ever producing any evidence of military targets and only a post-hoc rationalisation by the IDF. Bombing as it pleases is exactly what Israel is doing.

The evidence presented by Benatar to support the claim that Israel is going to “great lengths” to prevent civilian harm is that the death toll would have been higher had bombing been “indiscriminate”. This is an extraordinarily platitudinous basis on which to base a moral judgment. Israel has already killed 1% of the Gaza population. Should we wait until it reaches 2% or 5% or 10% before we agree that the killing is both disproportionate and indiscriminate?

The fact is, as Gordon and Perugini argued in 2016, “for Palestinians living in Gaza, simply spending time in their own homes, frequenting a mosque, going to a hospital or to school became a potentially lethal activity, since any one of these architectural edifices could become a target at any moment”. This “space of killing with impunity” has now been significantly expanded by the rote claims of human shields, parroted in the media and reproduced in Benatar’s opinion piece.

Words can indeed be fatal, because they can serve to rationalise illegal killing. It is no wonder the charge of genocide against Israel was taken to the International Court of Justice (ICJ).

• London is professor of public health medicine at the University of Cape Town.