Someone made the point (sorry, forget who) that these aren't "human shields" as we normally define that, but simply shields. The former are meant to deter - I put the hostage in front of me to prevent you from shooting the hostage as you are unwilling to do so. The Israeli army is using costumed
meat shields. At first it's hard to recognize them. They're usually wearing Israeli army uniforms, many of them are in their 20s, and they're always with Israeli soldiers of various ranks.
But if you look more closely, you see that most of them are wearing sneakers, not army boots. And their hands are cuffed behind their backs and their faces are full of fear. The soldiers call each of them a shawish, an obscure Arabic word of Turkish origin meaning sergeant.
...
Soldiers choose Gazans for the missions and bring them to the brigades and battalions operating in the Strip. "There is pride in it," said a source who took part in some of the "locating" work.
"The senior ranks know about it," the source said. The army has played innocent despite footage shown on Al Jazeera about two months ago. Israeli soldiers can be seen dressing Palestinian detainees in uniforms and flak jackets, putting cameras on them and sending them into badly damaged houses and tunnel entrances with their hands bound by plastic ties.
Meanwhile:
The U.S. has approved $20 billion in arms sales to Israel, including scores of fighter jets and advanced air-to-air missiles, the State Department announced Tuesday, two days before scheduled cease-fire talks begin in the region.
Israel has been clear that they have been
conducting a genocide for months now and while I don't expect everyone to care, precisely, I really don't have any space for people who are in denial about it.
But another part of my apprehension had to do with the fact that my view of what was happening in Gaza had shifted. On 10 November 2023, I wrote in the New York Times: “As a historian of genocide, I believe that there is no proof that genocide is now taking place in Gaza, although it is very likely that war crimes, and even crimes against humanity, are happening. […] We know from history that it is crucial to warn of the potential for genocide before it occurs, rather than belatedly condemn it after it has taken place. I think we still have that time.”
I no longer believe that. By the time I travelled to Israel, I had become convinced that at least since the attack by the IDF on Rafah on 6 May 2024, it was no longer possible to deny that Israel was engaged in systematic war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocidal actions. It was not just that this attack against the last concentration of Gazans – most of them displaced already several times by the IDF, which now once again pushed them to a so-called safe zone – demonstrated a total disregard of any humanitarian standards. It also clearly indicated that the ultimate goal of this entire undertaking from the very beginning had been to make the entire Gaza Strip uninhabitable, and to debilitate its population to such a degree that it would either die out or seek all possible options to flee the territory. In other words, the rhetoric spouted by Israeli leaders since 7 October was now being translated into reality – namely, as the 1948 UN Genocide Convention puts it, that Israel was acting “with intent to destroy, in whole or in part”, the Palestinian population in Gaza, “as such, by killing, causing serious harm, or inflicting conditions of life meant to bring about the group’s destruction”.
