Israel's Human Shields in Gaza: Palestinian "Johnnies"

Still eyeless: Gaza is a skeleton of its former self, compliments of an enduring Israeli siege (Ahmad Khateib/Getty Images)

In a report on last December's Gaza war released on July 2, Amnesty International found that both Israelis and Palestinians had committed war crimes, though in proportions far larger by the Israelis than by Palestinians (namely, Hamas).

Amnesty found that Israeli air strikes targeted civilians; dropped white phosphorus bombs, an incendiary, imprecise weapon that creates smoke walls to facilitate troop movements, but that also cascades over large areas and sears into human flesh through muscle, causing atrocious injuries and death; and used Palestinian civilians as human shields.

"Israeli forces," Amnesty's report found, "repeatedly took over Palestinian homes in the Gaza Strip forcing families to stay in a ground-floor room while they used the rest of their house as a military base and sniper position – effectively using the families, both adults and children, as “human shields” and putting them at risk.72 While soldiers wore protective body armour and helmets and shielded themselves behind sandbags as they fired from the houses, the Palestinian inhabitants of the houses had no such protection."

Israel denied the claims of targeting civilians or using them as human shields. But today in Israel, the group called Breaking the Silence, an organization that collects testimonies and oral histories by Israeli soldiers of the Israeli occupation of the West bank and the Gaza Strip, released 54 testimonies by some 26 Israeli soldiers who participated in the Gaza war ("Operation cast Lead," in Israeli military parlance), including confirmation of the use of Palestinian civilians as human shields.

Here's how one soldier described it:

It was the first week of the war, fighting was intense, there were explosive charges to expose, tunnels in open spaces and armed men inside houses. Warfare was slow and basically a very small area was occupied. Every unit, every force had a rather small designated area of several dozen houses only, which they had to take over, and that took a whole week. That is warfare and that took a whole week. They really moved slowly. Close in on each house. The method used has a new name now - no longer 'neighbor procedure.' Now people are called 'Johnnie.' They're Palestinian civilians, and they're called Johnnies and there were civilians there who stayed in spite of the flyers the army distributed before it went in. Most people did leave, but some civilians stayed to watch over the houses. Perhaps they had nowhere else to go. Later we saw people there who could not walk, some simply stayed to keep watch. To every house we close in on, we send the neighbor in, 'the Johnnie,' and if there are armed men inside, we start, like working the 'pressure cooker' in the West Bank.

The soldier was asked to explain what he meant by the "pressure cooker. In short, it meant sending in a civilian to check on the presence of armed men, or using "Johnnies" to smash walls for Israeli troops to storm through. Those allegations were made before (and reported here) only to be summarily investigated and denied by the Israeli military.

The soldier giving his testimony to Breaking the Silence scoffed at the denials: "It was ludicrous to read it and then hear the response of the army spokesperson that the matter was investigated and there are no testimonies on the ground and that the Israeli army is a moral army. It raises doubts about the army spokesperson's responses in general when you know for a fact that these things actually did take place."

It's been relatively quiet around Gaza since January (relative being the operative word). But while the Israeli press and several Israeli, Palestinian and other human rights organizations have done the job of bringing to light atrocities in the war, the Israeli government and military continue to project a form of steely indifference and outright contempt toward the reports, which suggests two things: First, there's little interest within the Israeli military to change what has become the indefensible and morally reprehensible tactic of protecting Israeli soldiers at the expense of Palestinian civilians. Second, there's even less interest in lifting the siege of Gaza or even alleviating it, moves that would go a long way toward preventing another war. The Israeli government and military are themselves in a state of siege. Collective punishment remains the most likely and dismal consequence.

See Also:

• Israel and Gaza - A Withdrawal That Did Not End Israel's Occupation
• Gaza-Israel: The Crazy War
• Israel Hijacks Humanitarian Ship Bound for Gaza
• Final Tally of 2009 Gaza War Casualties
• Hamas-Israeli Conflict - Background and Primers
• Waltz With Hamas: Israeli Atrocities in Gaza