A CNN report confirmed that Israel continues to use Palestinians of all ages as human shields in its operations in Gaza.
A CNN report confirmed on Thursday that the Israeli occupation army has used Palestinian detainees as human shields, forcing them to enter possibly booby-trapped houses and tunnels to avoid harm to Israeli soldiers.
The report, which was built on testimonies by one Israeli occupation soldier and five former Palestinian detainees, revealed that the practice was widely used among Israeli units in the besieged Gaza Strip.
The Israeli occupation soldier admitted to the American network that his unit held two Palestinians for that purpose.
“We told them to enter the building before us,” he told CNN.
“If there are any booby traps, they will explode and not us,” he added.
CNN reported that the practice was so widespread that the Israeli occupation army gave it the name of ‘Mosquito Protocol.’
It said that the ‘Mosquito Protocol’ was widely used in northern Gaza, Gaza City, Khan Yunis, and Rafah.
The “mosquito protocol” is a protocol common in the Gaza Strip in which Israeli soldiers use Palestinian civilians as human shields to explore dangerous places.
“If there are bombs, they will explode with them,” one of the soldiers says, adding that Israeli… pic.twitter.com/nVOUExlBuI
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The Israeli occupation soldier who spoke to CNN told the network that during his service in the north of Gaza at the start of the war, the army used standard methods to secure places they wished to enter such as “sending in a dog or punching a hole through its side with a tank shell or an armored bulldozer.”
However, this soon changed when an Israeli intelligence officer brought the unit two Palestinians aged 16 and 20, who he claimed were affiliated with the Palestinian resistance movement Hamas, to use as human shields to secure suspected places.
“It’s better that the Palestinians will explode and not our soldiers,” a commander told him when he questioned the practice.
According to CNN, the Israeli soldier along with others in his unit refused to use the new method and challenged their commander.
Their senior commander bluntly told the soldiers not to “think about international law,” and that their lives were “more important” than that of Palestinians before he yielded to the soldiers’ objections and released the two young Palestinian men.
‘I was Left No Choice’ – Palestinians used as Human Shields by Israeli Forces in Gaza
The unidentified soldier admitted that when the two Palestinian detainees were freed he became sure that they had no affiliation to Hamas.
The American network revealed in its report that it got in touch with the soldier through an Israeli organization named Breaking the Silence, which collects the testimonies of Israeli soldiers who speak out on their service in the occupied Palestinian territories.
Breaking the Silence provided CNN with three alarming photos of the practice.
“One haunting photograph shows two soldiers urging a civilian forward in a scene of devastation in northern Gaza. In a second, two civilians used as human shields sit bound and blindfolded. A third shows a soldier guarding a bound civilian,” the network reported.
What is the ‘Mosquito Protocol’?
According to five former Palestinian detainees interviewed by CNN, they were all held by the Israeli occupation forces and obliged into potentially dangerous places in front of the occupation military.
One of the five Palestinian detainees is 20-year-old Mohammad Saad.
Saad was forced at the start of the genocide in Gaza to flee his home city in Jabaliya in the north of the strip and take refuge in Khan Yunis, before being detained by the Israeli occupation army near Rafah while trying to fetch food aid for his younger siblings.
“The army took us in a jeep, and we found ourselves inside Rafah in a military camp,” he told CNN.
Israel is Torturing, Abducting and Using Children as Human Shields in Gaza – Analysis
Saad told the American network that he was held for 47 days and was used during this time as a human shield to protect Israeli soldiers.
“They dressed us in military uniforms, put a camera on us, and gave us a metal cutter,” Saad said.
The young man revealed to CNN that their tasks involved checking anything suspicious due to the Israeli soldiers’ extreme terror of hidden explosives.
“They would ask us to do things like, ‘move this carpet,’ saying they were looking for tunnels. ‘Film under the stairs,’ they would say. If they found something, they would tell us to bring it outside,” he explained.
He added: “For example, they would ask us to remove belongings from the house, clean here, move the sofa, open the fridge, and open the cupboard.”
The Israeli occupation army practiced physical violence with the Palestinian detainees when they refused to carry on orders.
“We went to a location, and they told me I had to film a tank left behind by the Israeli army. I was terrified and scared to film it, so they hit me on the back with the butt of a rifle.”
As a result, the young man was shot in the back when bullets rained at him once he approached the tank but miraculously survived following treatment.
CNN also spoke with another former Palestinian detainee, 17-year-old Mohammad Shbeir, accentuating the fact that Israeli occupation forces also used minors in this mission.
The teenager was detained by Israeli occupation soldiers after they murdered his father and sister in a raid in their makeshift home in Khan Yunis.
“I was handcuffed and wearing nothing but my boxers,” he told CNN.
“They used me as a human shield, taking me into demolished houses, places that could be dangerous or contain landmines,” Shbeir added.
The network also spoke is 59-year-old Dr. Yahya Khalil Al-Kayali.
Al-Kayali was displaced on multiple occasions from his home in Gaza City.
The Palestinian doctor was detained near the Al-Shifa Hospital in March when the Israeli occupation army besieged the medical facility for the third time.
“The leader of this group, the soldier, asked me to come,” Al-Kayali told CNN.
“He was talking to me in English. And he asked me to go out of the building to find any open holes or tunnels under the ground,” he added.
Al-Kayali was ordered by the Israeli occupation forces to carefully search “for militants and booby traps” in every room of a row of around 80 apartment buildings, with Israeli tanks ready to fire should Hamas fighters surface.
“I was thinking that I would be killed or die within minutes,” Al-Kayali told CNN.
“I was thinking about my family. Because there is no time to think about many things. But I was worried also about my kids, because my kids and my family were in the building,” he added.
After over a year of the genocide in the Gaza Strip, the practice is apparently still in use by the Israeli occupation army.
The unidentified Israeli soldier who spoke with CNN told the network that the ‘Mosquito Protocol’ was readopted in his unit after he had left Gaza.
“My own soldiers who refused it in the beginning were back to using this practice,” he said. “They have no strength like they had in the beginning.”
According to the American network, the Israeli occupation army claimed in response to CNN’s report that their “directives and guidelines strictly prohibit the use of detained Gaza civilians for military operations.”
(The Palestine Chronicle)
