Israeli parliament speaker cancels meeting with UN chief after statement calling for ceasefire
The speaker of the Israeli parliament on Friday canceled a meeting scheduled with Secretary-General António Guterres because of the UN leader's call for an "immediate humanitarian ceasefire" in Gaza.
"I intended to try and convince, as well as hand [the UN Secretary General] a book we prepared in the Knesset, documenting [October 7] with still images," Amir Ohana said in a statement. "But yesterday he again called on the State of Israel to stop fighting, criticizing it 'even if Hamas uses human shields.'"
Guterres said Thursday the level of destruction and number of people killed in Gaza show that “there is something wrong in the way the military operations are being conducted.”
Responding to a reporter who said Hamas is hiding within the civilian population, Guterres reiterated his condemnation of the use of human shields, adding that the protection of civilians is a must even in those circumstances. “I even said [the use of human shields is] a violation of international humanitarian law, but the same humanitarian international law is clear that even when there are human shields, there is an obligation to protect civilians,” he said. “In that regard, I think we are abiding by principle without double standards.”
In a news conference held after Ohana's statement, Guterres' spokesperson, Stephane Dujarric, told reporters the secretary general's office knew about the cancelation first through the media before receiving an official notification, adding that Guterres' statement on Thursday was not new.
Still using October 7 to justify genocide.
Also don't the IDF soldiers have family and go back home, 'hiding within the civilian population'. It's just a non statement at this point.
Actually it's a legal cover to commit war crimes. This goes into quite a lot of detail with examples
https://casebook.icrc.org/case-study/israel-human-rights-committees-report-beit-hanoun#para_34
however this sums it up quite well and explains the (last minute) evacuation orders, part of the legal cover
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/11/13/what-is-a-human-shield-and-why-is-israel-using-the-term-in-gaza
What are human shields?
Under international law, the term refers to civilians or other protected persons whose presence is used to render military targets immune from military operations. The use of human shields is forbidden by Protocol I of the Geneva Conventions and is considered a war crime as well as a violation of humanitarian law.
There are three kinds of human shields: Voluntary shields are people who willfully choose to stand in front of a legitimate target as a means of protection; Involuntary shields are people who are coercively deployed as bargaining chips or as a means to thwart an attack; and proximate shields are civilians or civilian sites that become shields or are cast as shields due to their proximity to the fighting.
After Israel instructed 1.1 million Palestinians in northern Gaza to move south, the family of Al Jazeera correspondent Youmna ElSayed received a phone call from the Israeli army warning them to immediately leave their home in Gaza City. They decided it was too risky to make the journey south amid the heavy bombardment.
Neve Gordon, co-author of Human Shields: A History of People in the Line of Fire, told Al Jazeera that evacuation orders give the warring party that issued it – in this case Israel – the ability to cast families like ElSayed’s and the entire population of northern Gaza as proximate human shields.
“Temporally, proximate shielding can endure far longer than either voluntary or involuntary shielding, because the latter two are restricted to the time during which the civilian acts or is forced into acting as a shield,” Gordon said. By contrast, proximate shields exist as long as the fighting continues.
Israel also claimed that Hamas prevented civilians from leaving northern Gaza, using them as involuntary shields, and that others had willfully stayed behind and would therefore be considered “an accomplice in a terrorist organisation”, according to mobile phone audio messages and air-dropped leaflets. Israel provided no proof that Hamas forced people to stay.
What are the implications of labelling civilians as human shields?
This label can be used by a warring party to “relax the repertoire of violence that is permitted to be used in that area”, said Gordon, who teaches international law at Queen Mary University of London.
The presence of human shields does not render a site immune from attack. While they are protected people according to the laws of war, the military assets they shield can still be legitimately targeted. If they die, the responsibility for their death is placed on those who use them as human shields, rather than on those who kill them. Therefore, “in an area where there are only human shields and combatants, more lethal violence can be used”, Gordon said.
The limits are drawn by the principles of distinction and proportionality: An army has the duty to target only the enemy, even if this means facing greater risks to minimise civilian casualties; and to weigh the military value of each attack against the civilian casualties that are likely to result from it.
Non-combatant civilians even if used as human shields are entitled to protection, experts say.
Marc Weller, chair of international law and international constitutional studies at the University of Cambridge, said that if 1,000 people were sheltering at a site that was proven to hide a Hamas presence, Israel would have to send soldiers in to only hit the enemy assets (principle of distinction). If it instead opted to bomb the compound from the air, it must be able to prove the existence of enemy assets and to argue that the “incidental” loss of life was proportionate to the military advantage gained (principle of proportionality).
Issuing an evacuation order to 1.1 million people and then considering an entire population as a legitimate target also contravenes the same principles. “Knocking on a building [to ask its residents to evacuate] may be reasonable, but telling a million people that they all have to get out because you are bombing everything is unreasonable,” the Cambridge professor told Al Jazeera.
“Israel cannot discharge its obligation of distinction by wishing the civilians away. This places the burden of protection on victims, rather than attackers.
Israel is playing a sick twisted games with loopholes in international laws. They have said often enough they have military lawyers embedded in the army to justify their 'collateral damage'.
“The law says hospitals are protected but immediately adds a series of exceptions where it is allowed to bomb hospitals,” Gordon said. “Israel knows what these exceptions are and frames the hospital as being a site where those exceptions apply.”
Gordon and co-author Nicola Perugini coined the phrase “medical lawfare” to describe “the idea of framing hospitals as carrying out a mission that is outside their humanitarian duty to justify strikes against them”. This is a strategy “repeatedly deployed by the Israeli military and government to legitimise attacks on life-sustaining and saving infrastructure and shift the blame onto the Palestinians themselves,” Gordon said.
“The very fact that we have seen 44 [Israeli] soldiers killed in this conflict and almost 11,000 [Palestinian] civilians gives an indication that the calculation of proportionality in Gaza has left the bounds of reasonableness.”
That was early November...
Doesn't surprise me lawyers are behind this, unethical scum of the earth. And with the Western media simply regurgitating everything the IDF claims as true, giving them the benefit of the doubt every single time, they're just as complicit in genocide.
