Israeli forces strapped explosives around the neck of an elderly Palestinian man in Gaza and forced him to act as a human shield before killing him and his wife, an investigation by the Israeli news website HaMakom has revealed.
The Palestinian man, who has not been named but is believed to have been well above the age of 80, was told that if he did not carry out the searches Israeli forces would detonate the explosives and “blow off his head.”
According to HaMakom, the incident took place in May last year when Israeli soldiers from several different brigades amassed near the house of the Palestinian couple, both aged in their 80s, in Gaza City’s Zeitoun neighbourhood.
At the time, Israeli forces had launched their third ground assault on the area after engaging in intense fighting with Hamas and other Palestinian movements.
HaMakom said that the Nahal Brigade, the Carmeli Brigade and the Multidimensional Unit, decided to use the elderly Palestinian man, who used a walking stick to get around, as the human shield.
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An Israeli soldier told HaMakom that after explosives were placed around the Palestinian man’s neck, he was told “that if he does something wrong or not the way we want, the person behind him will pull the rope and his head will detach from the body.”
“That’s how he walked around with us for eight hours, even though he’s an 80-year-old man and even though he couldn’t run away from us. And that’s knowing that there’s a soldier behind him who can pull the rope at any second – and he’s done,” the soldier added.
According to HaMakom, after the elderly Palestinian was forced to enter homes and tunnel allegedly used by Hamas, the soldiers ordered him and his wife to leave the area for al-Mawasi, a small area that at the time was just 1km wide and was being used to house hundreds of thousands of Palestinians.
However, HaMakom said that no other battalions were informed that the couple would be making their way south and within 100 metres of being allowed to leave they were both shot dead.
“They died like that, in the street,” another soldier told HaMakom.
‘Mosquito protocol’
According to HaMakom the decision to use the elderly man as a human shield was part of a long-standing tactic called the “mosquito protocol” which involves Israeli soldiers ordering Palestinians to enter potentially booby-trapped locations – houses, tunnels, and other structures – ahead of the Israeli troops.
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While the extent and scale of such operations are unknown, the practice, which is illegal under both Israeli and international law, has repeatedly been used in Gaza.
In August, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that the Israeli army had repeatedly used innocent Palestinians to enter homes and tunnels in its war on Gaza.
Nearly a year earlier, in December 2023, Middle East Eye received numerous testimonies from Palestinians that Israeli forces strapped explosives on civilians before forcing them into areas believed to be used by Hamas.
Later that month, medical staff at the Shifa Hospital told MEE that Israeli soldiers used them as human shields when inspecting the hospital’s grounds.
“When they stormed the ground stores, they used us [doctors] as human shields to enter and search them. They found the technical maintenance employees there and interrogated them, before they detained them,” a doctor told MEE.
The Israeli army, just as it has in previous investigation, has denied using Palestinians as human shields, and on Saturday rejected the charge that the 80-year-old man was abused by its soldiers. It also refuted reports relating to the existence of the mosquito protocol.
But another Israeli soldier rejected the army’s official line, telling HaMakom that “the mosquito protocol is completely regulated, and it’s a very gray zone within the army.”
“It’s something from the battalion commander’s level and lower. It goes down as a regulated order, and somewhere at the level of the brigade commander they deny it completely. When they start making problems, they pass the responsibility down and they say not to do it,” the soldier said.
“Even when the investigations come out, there’s no chance that the IDF [Israeli army] will admit that this is the regulated order, but if you go to every fighter who fights in Gaza, there’s no one to tell you that it’s not happening.”
