Photo: Omar El-Qattaa/AFP via Getty Images
On Tuesday night, CNN reported that Israeli civilians in parts of Tel Aviv were in the potential line of fire from an Iranian missile attack aimed at the headquarters of Mossad, the Israeli state intelligence agency. The cable network described Mossad’s central location as a “densely populated area” — a civilian area in which a key asset of the Israeli state military is embedded.
One phrase was conspicuously missing from CNN’s coverage, a term I grew up hearing in Gaza: “human shields.”
For decades, Israel has attributed the vast number of civilian deaths in Gaza by alleging that Hamas decided to locate itself within civilian infrastructure. The huge numbers of Palestinians killed by Israeli bullets and bombs were, according to this narrative, not Israel’s victims. Instead, they were Hamas’s “human shields.”
The label arose because of the proximity of these civilian casualties’ homes and workplaces to sites of Hamas operations in, to borrow CNN’s words, “densely populated areas.”
The Western media’s double standards when it comes to Israel and Palestine are hardly new. The discourse around “human shields” — or the failure to use the term — is an example of hypocrisy pushed to the extreme. Earlier this year, several of CNN’s own staff complained of “a systemic and institutional bias within the network toward Israel.”
Just last week, CNN reported that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accused Hezbollah of using its civilians as human shields for years. CNN did not, meanwhile, describe Israel as also using its civilians as “human shields” around Mossad’s headquarters.
The different language for different people came as no surprise to me. As a Palestinian journalist from Gaza, I grew up with these poisonous narratives: Palestinian are portrayed as terrorists who allow Hamas to hide among them.
The toll of this narrative can be counted in Palestinian — and, more recently, Lebanese — lives. It has allowed Israel a free hand to kill civilians. In the current Gaza genocide, well over 40,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israel, most of them women and children.
It is a toll I am far too familiar with: My mother, who worked at the United Nations, and my sister, who was a physiotherapist, were killed in the war. Neither was any more of a human shield than the residents of Tel Aviv. They were civilians killed by Israel.
Israeli Human Shields
The first time I heard the expression “human shields,” however, was not in reference to Hamas.
For as long as I can remember, Israeli soldiers were the ones employing the tactic of using humans as shields: Palestinian humans.
In 2014, during the Israeli ground invasion of Khuza’a, near the southern Gaza town of Khan Younis, news emerged of Israeli forces trapping a Palestinian family in the area and forcing their 16-year-old son Ahmad Abu Rida to step outside the house at gunpoint.
Abu Rida was kidnapped and used as a “human shield” by Israeli soldiers for five days to search for alleged Hamas tunnels. Following his release, Abu Rida said that Israeli soldiers also abused him both psychologically and physically.
I was a 10-year-old child at the time, shaken by the thought that I, too, might endure the horrifying experience that Abu Rida went through.
As the years passed, Israeli forces continued the same inhumane acts, with more persecution and degradation in the West Bank — with cover from the framing of the media and, in turn, acquiescence of the U.S. government.
Though the use of involuntary human shields has been a war crime under the Geneva Convention since 1949, this dynamic is not new.
The U.S. media has a long history of accusing America’s ideological foes of using civilians as “human shields.” In 1967, the Associated Press reportedly described the Viet Cong as “using children as human shields.” President George W. Bush highlighted Saddam Hussein’s use of civilians as “human shields” to justify his Iraq War.
Now, as Israel’s leaders and military treat the entire Gaza Strip and its residents as a human shield — including every hospital, school, and refugee camp — the meaning of the phrase “human shield” under international law is perverted beyond recognition.
For Palestinians, the term goes further than a mere description of our bodies on Israel’s front lines; it reduces our existence to that of sub-humans, treating our lives as worthless — as objects and war tools.
CNN did not, of course, vehemently denounce Israel’s use of civilians as “human shields” when it noted Mossad’s civilian-dense location. Because for CNN, like almost every Western media outlet, Israelis, unlike Palestinians, get to be human.