Palestinians describe being used as ‘human shields’ by Israeli troops in Gaza

After they burned down his family home in northern Gaza, Israeli troops separated Ramez al-Skafi from his family and detained him. They had a particular job in mind for him, he said.

For the next 11 days in early July, the 30-year-old Palestinian said he was sent into one house after another in his home district, Shuja’iya, watched by his Israeli military minders. According to the account he gave the Guardian, they turned him into a human shield against booby-traps and Hamas gunmen.

“I tried to resist their proposal, but they started beating me and the officer told me it was not my choice to make and that I have to do whatever they want,” Skafi said. “He told me that my work would be searching the houses and telling them information about the homeowners. After some extreme pressure, I was left no choice.

“The next day I was told to go out on patrol with the Israeli soldiers, and I was very scared because of the tanks in front of me and the planes in the sky above me,” he continued. “When [his minders] noticed my fear, they assured me: ‘They know you are with us.’”

Skafi was one of three Palestinians interviewed by the Guardian who said they had been used by units of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), sent far ahead of Israeli soldiers into unexplored houses and tunnels in Gaza. According to whistleblowers who spoke to the dissident veterans’ group Breaking The Silence (BTS), the practice is widespread.

The forcible use of Palestinian detainees to enter houses and tunnels in Gaza first came into public view in footage broadcast by Al Jazeera television in June and July. An investigation by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz in August gathered testimony from Israeli soldiers who said the Palestinians used as shields were known as “shawish”, a word of Turkish origin meaning “sergeant”. The soldiers suggested that it was an institutionalised tactic approved by senior officers.

Related: Israeli forces in Gaza ‘use civilians as human shields’ against possible booby-traps

“It’s done with the knowledge of the brigade commander, at the least,” a conscript in a combat unit said.

The use of prisoners as human shields is a clear violation of the Geneva conventions and is expressly prohibited under Israeli law. The IDF has denied it employs the “shawish” tactic.

“The orders and directives of the IDF prohibit the use of Gazan civilians captured in the field for military missions that endanger them. The protocols and orders have been clarified to the troops on the ground,” the IDF said in a statement, adding that the reported claims had been “forwarded to be examined by the relevant authorities”.

The testimony gathered by the Guardian from former Palestinian detainees is largely consistent with the reporting by Al Jazeera and Haaretz.

On several occasions in the course of his detention, Skafi said he was made to hand-carry small quadcopter drones into the houses being searched so that the Israelis could see what was inside through the drones’ built-in cameras.

“After I had finished filming the houses from the inside and left, they entered and they started destroying it,” Skafi said.

“Every day, after they’d finished with me, they used to tie my hands and cover my eyes. They only took the chains off when they were giving me food or when I was allowed to go to the bathroom.”

Skafi said that on the sixth day of being used to clear houses in Shuja’iya, his IDF captors came under fire from a Hamas gunman, leading to a gunfight and a standoff that lasted from noon until that evening.

“During that period they used me as a human shield. I was in the middle. They said to the resistance fighter: “Give yourself up, or we’ll kill this civilian,” Skafi alleged. The IDF eventually succeeded in killing the lone Hamas fighter, he said, and forced Skafi to enter the house the militant had been using as a sniper position and photograph the body with a mobile phone.

Skafi said the IDF unit using him was furious with him because the sniper position was in a house he had been sent to check earlier in the day, and Skafi was accused of helping conceal the gunman’s presence.

Skafi swore the man had not been there when he had searched the house, but he said his protestations did not spare him from prolonged beatings, which continued until the unit’s senior officer came to him after four days of interrogation with a plate of rice, and told Skafi his account had indeed been found to be true.

The same officer also told him the unit’s operations in Shuja’iya were wrapping up and Skafi would no longer be needed. On his 11th day in detention, his shackles were removed, and he was given a bag containing food and water and told to go home.

Skafi complained to the soldiers that he was too exhausted to carry a heavy package but they said the bag would identify him as someone who had worked with the IDF so he would not be targeted by Israeli fire as he made his way back across Shuja’iya to his family.

The accounts provided by Skafi and other former Palestinian detainees in Gaza generally confirm the accounts given by Israeli soldiers to other media and activist groups.

In one recent incident, the details of which were given to the Guardian by friends of the Israeli involved, a Palestinian “shawish” grabbed hold of an IDF soldier’s gun and in the ensuing struggle shot the soldier in the foot, before the Palestinian was killed by other soldiers in the unit.

Whistleblower testimony given to the Israeli dissident group BTS suggests the use of human shields is rife.

“We had a guy who spoke Arabic in the company, and … he sent them [Palestinian detainees] to open up the houses so that if there was a bomb, they [the Palestinians] would be the ones to get blown up,” one IDF soldier whistleblower told BTS, saying that one of the human shields used was a Palestinian teenager.

Nadav Weiman, a former IDF sniper and now BTS director, said: “From what we understand it was a very widely used protocol, meaning there are hundreds of Palestinians in Gaza who have been used as human shields.

“Palestinians are being grabbed from humanitarian corridors inside Gaza … and then they’re being brought to different units inside Gaza – regular infantry units, not special forces.” Weiman said. “And then those Palestinians are being used as human shields to sweep tunnels and also houses. In some cases, they have a GoPro camera on their chest or on their head and in almost all of the cases, they are cuffed before they are taken into a tunnel or house to sweep and they are dressed in IDF uniform.”

Being dressed in an Israeli uniform would be a source of particular shame for Palestinian detainees, and the three interviewed by the Guardian all said they had successfully resisted pressure to wear IDF combat fatigues. But they claimed they were deliberately put in harm’s way to protect soldiers.

“They took us to missions with them, sending me to the houses in front of them to make sure of their safety, and then they would enter behind us, and after they left, they used to blow up the house behind them,” said Ismail al-Sawalhi, a 30-year-old blacksmith and farmer from Jabaliya camp in northern Gaza.

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Sawalhi was detained near the Kerem Shalom crossing in the south in July and made to work as a human shield for an IDF unit for 12 days of clearing operations in Rafah.

“The soldiers protected themselves with us all the time so that they would not be attacked by the resistance,” he said. “We were like toys in their hands.”

A 35-year-old from Beit Lahia in northern Gaza, who identified himself only as Abu Said for fear of reprisals but whose identity was verified by the Guardian, said he was detained in February and used as a human shield over a period of four hours.

“The Israeli soldiers put a GPS tracker on my hand and told me: ‘If you try to run away, we will shoot you. We will know where you are,’” he said. “I was asked to go to knock on the doors of four houses and two schools and ask people to leave – women and children first and then the men.

“At one of the schools, the situation was very dangerous,” he said. “I shouted to everyone in the school to leave quietly, but at that moment there was heavy shooting by the Israeli army and I thought I was going to die.”

At the end of the day, the tracker was taken off, and Abu Said was told to leave the area waving a white flag he was supplied with.

“If you don’t do what they ask, they will kill you without hesitation,” he said.

The use of prisoners as human shields is prohibited under article 28 of the fourth Geneva conventions, which states: “The presence of a protected person [for example a prisoner] may not be used to render certain points or areas immune from military operations.”

In 2002, Israel’s high court issued an injunction prohibiting the IDF from using what was known as the “neighbour procedure”, detaining a Palestinian in an area of unrest and ordering the detainee to knock on the doors of their neighbours and oversee the clearance of their houses.

The use of human shields lived on, however. In 2010 two IDF staff sergeants were demoted for forcing a nine-year-old Palestinian boy to open a number of bags suspected of containing explosives.

Bill van Esveld, Human Right Watch’s associate director for children’s rights in the Middle East and North Africa, said: “There is this repeated history of well documented accounts by UN bodies, as well as by human rights groups, and indications of Israeli awareness of the problem, but no action.

“It’s no surprise that this longstanding problem would persist.”