‘Mosquito protocol’: Israeli army's chilling tactic of using Palestinians as human shields

By Maryam Qarehgozlou

In a chilling scene, an 80-year-old Palestinian man with an explosive cord wrapped around his neck was forced to navigate through the deserted homes in Gaza City’s Zeitoun neighborhood.

For eight agonizing hours, he was made to serve as a human shield for Israeli soldiers, his frail body pushed to its limits as he searched abandoned houses under the constant threat of detonation.

This distressing event was recorded in May last year at the height of the Israeli military’s genocidal war against the Gaza Strip, which resulted in massive displacement in its besieged territory of 2.3 million people and the killing of more than 48,000 Palestinians, most of them women and children.

The elderly Palestinian man and his wife, both facing mobility challenges, were unable to evacuate to southern Gaza following displacement orders. The man relied on a cane to walk.

Upon discovering the couple, Israeli occupation soldiers exploited the old man’s vulnerability, threatening to detonate the explosive cord if he did not comply with their orders.

They detained his elderly wife at her home while the 80-year-old man, supported by his cane, was forced into walking ahead of the soldiers from the Israeli military's notorious Nahal Brigade.

After the job was done, the Israeli soldiers ordered the couple to flee. However, as they desperately tried to escape, they were spotted by another Israeli battalion and mercilessly shot dead on the spot.

According to testimonies provided to the investigative outlet The Hottest Place in Hell by Israeli occupation soldiers present during the incident, they did not care to inform the nearby forces from different divisions that the elderly couple was about to cross through the area.

“After 100 meters, the other battalion saw them and immediately shot them,” a soldier was quoted as saying by the outlet. “They died like that, in the street.”

In February, The Hottest Place in Hell revealed yet another disturbing case involving the use of Palestinians as human shields by the Israeli military, which was also carried out by the Nahal Brigade.

According to the report, they forcefully employed a Palestinian civilian as a human shield during an assault. Tragically, the individual was fatally shot by an uninformed commander who was unaware of the civilian’s presence, despite being granted permission to remain in the building with the soldiers.

The use of Palestinian civilians, including old and young, as human shields is a component of the Israeli military’s so-called “Mosquito Protocol,” a practice that has become common in the Gaza Strip since the events of October 7, 2023, when the Israeli regime launched its genocidal war on Gaza.

This information has been corroborated by testimonies from both Israeli occupation soldiers and former Palestinian abductees who were illegally held in Israeli detention facilities for years.

They paint a grim picture of Palestinians held as abductees. They were coerced into scouting and filming within tunnel networks where Israeli soldiers believed resistance fighters might be hiding.

Furthermore, they were forced to enter potentially rigged buildings in search of hidden explosives and instructed to move objects, such as generators and water tanks, which Israeli occupation soldiers feared could be concealing tunnel entrances or booby traps.

The issue of Israeli forces using Palestinian civilians as human shields has been extensively documented by media outlets, underscoring the severity and pervasiveness of this inhumane practice.

A report published by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz in August said these incidents involving the use of Palestinians as human shields occurred repeatedly with the full knowledge of senior officers.

The report shed light on the Israeli regime’s dehumanization of Palestinians, citing a mentality among soldiers that “It is better for them [Palestinians] to blow themselves up than the soldiers,” as the soldiers were told by the senior commanders.

According to the report, the Palestinians used as human shields are typically made to wear Israeli army uniforms, but not army boots, with their hands cuffed behind their backs.

While many of these individuals are in their 20s, the practice has also involved minors and the elderly. The Israeli soldiers refer to each of these individuals as a “shawish,” an Arabic term of Turkish origin meaning sergeant.

In late October last year, CNN further explored the so-called protocol in an article, which featured testimony from an Israeli soldier and five former Palestinian abductees who had been subjected to this dehumanizing treatment.

The soldier admitted that his unit had held two Palestinian abductees, a 16-year-old boy, and a 20-year-old man, explicitly to use them as human shields to probe dangerous places.

He stated that this practice was widespread among Israeli military units operating in Gaza.

“We told them to enter the building before us,” he explained. “If there are any booby traps, they will explode and not us.”

Mohammad Saad, a 20-year-old Palestinian, recounted his 47-day ordeal at a military camp in Rafah city, southern Gaza, after being abducted by Israeli genocidal forces while attempting to secure food aid for himself and his younger brothers.

Saad revealed that Israeli forces dressed him in military uniforms, placed cameras on him, and instructed him to engage in various tasks, such as cleaning and searching for tunnels.

“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. For example, they would ask us to remove belongings from the house, clean here, move the sofa, open the fridge, and open the cupboard," he stated.

Mohammad Shubeir, a 17-year-old Palestinian, shared his harrowing experience of being held captive for 10 days after Israeli soldiers killed his father and sister during a raid on their home in Khan Younis, southern Gaza Strip.

“I was handcuffed and wearing nothing but my boxers,” he recalled. “They used me as a human shield, taking me into demolished houses, places that could be dangerous or contain landmines.”

Dr. Yahya Khalil Al-Kayali, 59, was like thousands of other Gazans displaced over and over again. He eventually found himself living near Al Shifa Hospital, once Gaza’s largest medical complex, joining thousands of internally displaced civilians who took up shelter there.

In March last year, the Israeli military laid siege to the medical complex for a third time, falsely claiming that Hamas was using it as a command center, a claim rejected by both Hamas and Israeli pundits.

The two-week-long devastating raid resulted in the destruction of the hospital and the arrest of a substantial number of men inside the hospital, including Al-Kayali.

Al-Kayali recounted being ordered by soldiers to search every room in a series of apartment buildings for resistance fighters and booby traps, all while Israeli tanks stood at the ready, prepared to open fire should Hamas fighters be discovered.

“I was thinking that I would be killed or die within minutes,” he recalled. “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.”

Al-Kayali was coerced into checking as many as 80 apartments before he was released.

A separate investigation conducted by The New York Times in October further corroborated the accounts that Israeli soldiers and spies had systematically employed abducted Palestinians as human shields throughout the genocidal war in Gaza.

The report revealed that this unlawful practice was perpetrated by at least 11 squads across five cities in Gaza, often with the direct involvement of officers from Israeli spy agencies.

Interviews with seven Israeli soldiers who either observed or participated in the practice depicted it as “routine, commonplace and organized, conducted with considerable logistical support and the knowledge of superiors on the battlefield.”

Some low-ranking officers attempted to justify the use of human shields by baselessly claiming that the detainees were “terrorists” rather than civilians held without charge.

Despite these claims, officers often acknowledged that their detainees had no ties to any resistance groups and subsequently released them without charge, as confirmed by an Israeli occupation soldier and three Palestinians who spoke to The New York Times.

Despite the mounting evidence and investigations, “there is no chance” the Israeli military admit to the practice of using Palestinians as human shields, according to +972 Magazine and Local Call.

The website quoted a soldier as saying, “If you ask any combat soldier who fought in Gaza, there’s not a single one who will tell you this doesn’t happen. There’s no battalion, at least in the regular army, that can honestly say it hasn’t used this practice.”

Recently released Palestinians, exchanged as part of a ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas, have also reported being used as human shields by Israeli forces.

Adel Sbieh, a 22-year-old Palestinian man from Gaza, shared his experience as a human shield after his release during the sixth round of the exchange on Saturday.

Sbieh described being told by Israeli soldiers that “your life doesn’t matter to us” as he endured brutal physical and psychological torture, leading to the loss of one of his legs due to deliberate medical neglect in Israeli detention centers.

In January 2024, 36-year-old Palestinian shop owner Bahaa el-Din Abu Ras recounted a two-hour ordeal in Dura, in the occupied West Bank, during which Israeli soldiers used him as a human shield.

Similarly, in June 2024, Israeli forces tied a wounded Palestinian man, Mujahed Azmi, to the hood of a military vehicle during a raid on the occupied West Bank city of Jenin, prompting Francesca Albanese, the UN’s special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territory, to label it “human shielding in action.”

International law strictly prohibits the use of civilians to shield military activity or to forcibly involve civilians in military operations.

However, instances of Israeli forces using Palestinians as human shields can be traced back to 2002 in the occupied West Bank during the second intifada.

This practice, known as “the neighbor procedure,” was used by Israeli soldiers to send Palestinians into buildings fearing booby traps. This was also done in the search for wanted resistance fighters.

The court’s president, Aharon Barak, ruled that a resident of an occupied territory “should not be brought, even with his consent, into an area where a military operation is taking place.”

Barak at the time called the practice “cruel and barbaric.”

Israel has long claimed that Hamas is using civilians in Gaza as human shields, claiming that the resistance group embeds military infrastructure in civilian areas, allegations that remain unproven.

The Israeli military frequently cites these claims to justify the high civilian death toll in Gaza, where it has relentlessly bombed residential areas over 15 months before the recent ceasefire.

However, in a damning report published in March 2024, Albanese explained that Israel has repeatedly invoked the claim that Palestinian resistance groups have used human shields in 2008, 2012, 2014, 2021, and 2022 in an attempt to legitimize its attacks.

However, these claims have been consistently debunked by human rights investigations, including a commission of inquiry in 2008, she said.

Following the disturbing revelation of the 80-year-old Gazan man being used as a human shield, social media users reacted with outrage, labeling the regime and its soldiers as “Nazi”, “evil,” and “dirty cowards.”

“It is biblical-level evilness,” Furkan Gözükara, a Computer Engineer, wrote on X, formerly Twitter.

“Evil is manifesting through Israel,” asserted another user.

“Another despicable Israeli crime by IDF [Israeli military]. I hope @icj [International Court of Justice] is taking full notes of all these atrocities,” wrote pro-Palestine activist Ali Hadi.

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