It’s 6 a.m. on a summer day in June, and Mohamed Saad, 20, is jolted awake by soldiers from the Israel Defence Forces.
They help him put on clothes: IDF military fatigues. He’s reluctant to accept the help but has little choice in the matter — he’s in Israeli custody at a temporary detention facility in Rafah, and the uniform is the least of his concerns.
Saad is put in a tank with IDF troops and taken to an apartment building. He’s given a camera and an earpiece. Then, he’s told he must enter and search for explosives, Hamas militants and tunnel shafts, clearing the building for troops to follow behind.
There are, indeed, militants inside this particular building — and when they see Saad in his IDF uniform, they shoot at him.
“God saved and protected me,” he told CBC freelance videographer Mohamed El Saife when recounting the near miss.
Saad would be taken on a total of 15 such missions during his 47 days in detention, forced at gunpoint, he says, to act as a human shield on IDF patrols of residential buildings in the Gaza Strip.
“Every time I went out, I would put my soul between my hands and pray to God … ‘Oh, God, I want to go home to my mom and siblings,'” he said. “Every time, I would feel fear.”
Eventually, he was released on Aug. 9 and says he was never told why he was detained in the first place.
IDF says use of civilians prohibited
Israel’s high court banned the military from using Palestinians as human shields in combat in 2005. But accounts from Palestinians who’ve been detained and ex-IDF soldiers collected by human rights groups, media and a whistleblower organization of former soldiers suggest the practice has continued, including during this war and past conflicts in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.
The IDF did not comment directly on the allegations made in this story but said in a statement to CBC that the claims were forwarded to the “relevant authorities” to be evaluated.
“Orders and directives of the IDF prohibit the use of Gazan civilians captured in the field for military missions that endanger them.”
The International Criminal Court defines the term “human shield” as “utilizing the presence of a civilian or other protected person to render certain points, areas or military forces immune from military operations.” Doing so is considered a war crime.
Saad says that during his 47-day detention, he went on 15 tours as a human shield with IDF troops to ensure residential buildings were free of bombs and militants before the soldiers went in.
‘Scared of dying at any moment’
Saad says his ordeal began June 23, when he was near the Kerem Shalom border crossing between southern Gaza, Israel and Egypt. A tailor by profession, Saad had been driving aid trucks from the border since the war broke out, but that day, he says, Israeli forces showed up with several tanks and picked up Saad along with 18 other men.
“I was going to get goods for me and my siblings,” he said. “What fault is it of mine they take me as a human shield?”
After being kept in tents at the border for three days, the men were taken to Rafah, Saad said.
“We thought we were going home. All of a sudden, we found ourselves in a military facility.”
Saad says he and the other detainees were taken out on missions with the Israeli troops and forced to search the first floors of abandoned apartment buildings, guided by soldiers speaking through an earpiece who see what the camera sees.
“They would instruct us: ‘Go here,’ ‘Lift this carpet,’ ‘Lift the couch.’ … ‘Check the walls like this.'”
They would tell the men to cut any wires they found, including in breaker boxes, Saad said, and to move furniture that had been piled up to block parts of the house.
“If there is something that is suspicious … they’d ask us to move it … check what’s inside … film what’s inside.”
Only after he had declared the floor clear would the troops go in.
In the beginning, detainees would enter a building two or three at a time, Saad said. But as he and the other men objected more strongly to being sent inside, he said, they were split up and sent in one at a time.
Saad said he didn’t encounter any militants after that first incident but felt the same fear each time: walking into a building, not knowing what was waiting for him inside and whether he would live to see another day.
“We were scared of dying at any moment,” Saad said.
Hamas also accused of using civilians as human shields
Israel itself has accused Hamas of using civilians and hostages as human shields during and in the wake of the Oct. 7 Hamas-led attack on southern Israel that prompted Israel’s incursion into Gaza.
Israeli authorities say about 1,200 people were killed on Oct. 7 and another 250 were taken hostage. Israel’s subsequent ground and air invasion into Gaza has killed around 40,000 Palestinians, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.
Human Rights Watch published a report in July saying it was aware of “at least two incidents in which Palestinian fighters appear to have used civilians as human shields” while carrying out the Oct. 7 attack.
HRW says alleged planning documents for the attack obtained by the media referenced a “hostage detention plan” that involved tying up Israeli hostages and using them as human shields, “making sure they are clearly visible.”
Israel has also accused Hamas of shielding behind Palestinian civilians inside Gaza. It has justified some of its airstrikes on hospitals, schools and shelters for the displaced in part by saying Hamas fighters and leaders intentionally hide inside such civilian infrastructure and store weapons there.
Hamas has denied such claims, instead blaming Israel for putting civilians in danger and accusing the IDF of intentionally targeting them.
Use of human shields is now IDF protocol, group says
Some soldiers deployed in Gaza in the past 11 months have given accounts of the IDF’s use of civilian detainees.
In August, an investigation by the Israeli paper Haaretz detailed reports from soldiers and commanders alleging the widespread use of civilian detainees to inspect homes that may be rigged with explosives.
Nadav Weiman, executive director of the organization Breaking the Silence, told CBC that the use of human shields in Gaza is common. The group collects testimony from former IDF soldiers about conditions in the Palestinian territories.
“I thought it’s an isolated event, but then more soldiers came and talked about it, and you [start to] understand it’s a widely used protocol in the IDF,” he told CBC News.
“It’s [happening at] different times in the 11 months of this war. Different times, different units, different places in the Gaza Strip. So, you have something that is so widely used, and it looks like it’s coming back to the IDF.”
Weiman, the executive director of Breaking the Silence, says former IDF soldiers have told him they would argue that using Palestinians as human shields was going too far.
Weiman said soldiers whom the organization has interviewed described similar scenarios to what Saad outlined: civilians picked up by the IDF near humanitarian corridors, given IDF uniforms, equipped with GoPro cameras and sent to sweep tunnels and residential buildings.
“I’m not here to defend Hamas,” Weiman said. “But … talking as an Israeli, I’m saying that if you were accusing someone of something, we need to make sure that we are not doing the same thing.”
Soldiers disagree over use of civilians
Not everyone in the IDF is on board with the idea of using Palestinians as human shields, Weiman said. Soldiers who talked to the organization said there was an “internal struggle” among troops over the practice.
One IDF veteran told Weiman it wasn’t until the detainee his unit had been using as a human shield was released that the troops realized he was not being held because he was under suspicion.
“We just released him back to his family,” the soldier told Weiman. “And then we understood that he wasn’t indicted as [a] terrorist or [under] investigation. No, nothing. He’s innocent.”
From the IDF perspective, using non-combatants is part of the strategy around human shields, Weiman said.
“You cannot take some [Hamas militant], because you’re going to put an IDF uniform on him, he will see how our unit is operating and then go to the tunnel and get debriefed,” Weiman said.
“You need to take innocent people, and that’s the dehumanization of Palestinians after 57 years of occupation … because in a lot of cases, we don’t even see them as human beings. They are an entity, the enemy.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu must give up the ‘fantasy’ of a military victory over Hamas and negotiate for the release of hostages, says Jonathan Dekel-Chen, father of Sagui Dekel-Chen, believed to be one of the hostages Hamas is still holding in Gaza.
Adalah, a legal centre for Arab minority rights in Israel and one of the groups that petitioned the Supreme Court to have the military’s use of human shields declared illegal in 2005, said it, too, is aware of the practice being used in the current war.
“The Israeli military’s criminal use of the civilian population as human shields is not new. However, its renewed, widespread exercise joins a series of other extreme practices that have been in place since Oct. 7,” Adalah said in a statement to CBC.
The organization says it sent a letter on July 10 to Israel’s defence minister and attorney general demanding an immediate halt to the practice but has not heard back.
‘I was terrified’
For Saad, his 15th operation was the one that earned him his freedom — but not before he was shot a second time, he says. And this time, the bullet did not miss.
Again he was taken out in the morning, but this time, he says, he was dressed as a civilian and told to film an abandoned military tank.
He realized he’d be scoping it out for explosives and other dangers.
“My heart sank, and I was terrified — fear in every sense of the word.”
He wondered why this time he was searching a tank instead of a building and why he wasn’t in uniform. He was never told the reason.
Saad says he refused multiple times to go near the tank. But the troops he was with beat him on the back with their guns, he said, and threatened to shoot him if he didn’t.
He says he walked about 10 metres toward the vehicle when IDF soldiers began shooting at him.
“A bullet went through my back and came out from the front,” he said. “I bled for 30 minutes until I lost consciousness.”
Saad says he was taken to a military hospital in Soroka, Israel, although he didn’t realize where he was until the day someone came to tell him he’d be going back to Gaza.
“I still didn’t think I would go home to my family,” Saad said. “I thought they would return me to the army.”
He was brought by ambulance to the Kerem Shalom border crossing, where a Gaza Health Ministry ambulance met him and took him to the Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Younis.
As he looked back on the experience later, he told CBC’s El Saife that he had thought of escaping many times but that on every mission, there’d be “a tank on each side” and a drone above.
“You can’t run away from them,” Saad said. “You can’t do anything.
“If you thought of doing anything, they would shoot you instantly.”
