In the line of fire: In Gaza, anyone can wind up a 'human shield'

Of all the phrases that get tossed about in fierce arguments over the current war in Gaza, one of the most common might be "human shield."

In both the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, and Israel's attacks on Gaza in the four months since then, civilians accounted for at least two-thirds of the victims.

Israel has argued that Hamas deliberately uses the civilian population of the Gaza Strip both to shield its fighters and to attempt to discredit Israel's legitimate efforts to defend itself — by portraying Israel as a callous killer of civilians in the court of public opinion, and in the Court of International Justice.

Critics of Israel's campaign have said the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) use the term as a catch-all excuse for killing thousands of civilians who were merely in proximity to Hamas fighters and infrastructure in a crowded territory where there is nowhere else for them to go. They also accuse Israel of hypocrisy and point to some of its army's own practices as classic examples of human shield use.

International law has only so much to say on the subject, and the legal concept of the human shield only dates back to 1977, when Protocol 1 was added to the Geneva Convention: "The presence or movements of the civilian population or individual civilians shall not be used to render certain points or areas immune from military operations, in particular in attempts to shield military objectives from attacks or to shield, favour or impede military operations."

In short, said international law professor Neve Gordon, "protected people — civilians — cannot be used to shield a legitimate military target. And if they are used, then it does not render the target immune from attack. I can still attack the target even if it is protected by human shields."

But the presence of "human shields" doesn't free an attacking army from the rule of proportionality — which states that the cost in civilian lives must be justified by the importance of the military objective. Even if one side cynically places civilians between itself and an enemy, that does not give the other side carte blanche to kill everybody.

Gordon, an Israeli-born professor of international law and human rights at Queen Mary University of London, is co-author of the book "Human shields: A History of People in the Line of Fire."

He said there have always been both voluntary and involuntary human shields. American Rachel Corrie — a volunteer with the pro-Palestinian International Solidarity Movement — or Greenpeace activists who used their own bodies to prevent nuclear weapons tests in the Pacific are examples of people who exposed themselves willingly.

Other human shields, Gordon said, are essentially hostages — "Me as a soldier taking a civilian, putting the civilian in front of me so that the other warring party won't try to kill me, or using the civilian to open a bag in a house to make sure it's not booby-trapped."

"Now, what we claim is that there is a third kind of human shield," Gordon told CBC News. "That is the human shield that does not volunteer and is not coerced, but just by being where they are, they become human shields. Or more precisely, I would say they're framed as human shields.

"In the Gaza Strip, for example, if the Hamas tunnels are a legitimate military target, and the tunnels span 700 kilometres, then they are under the whole Gaza Strip. So anyone above them becomes a human shield. And so you are casting or framing the whole civilian population almost as human shields.

"Now why is that important? Because according to international law, once someone is a 'human shield,' the law doesn't require you to protect them as much as you would protect a civilian … And when you kill them, the party to blame is not you that killed them, but the party that used them.

"That's the logic."