Gazans say Israel used them as human shields

The Israeli soldiers outside Majdi Abed Rabbo's home were after the three Hamas fighters holed up next door, and they wanted Abed Rabbo...

By Dion Nissenbaum

PETER DEJONG / AP

Billboards defaced: Ultra-Orthodox Jews in Jerusalem on Tuesday walk past a vandalized Labor party campaign poster depicting Labor party leader Ehud Barak, center, Likud Party leader Benjamin Netanyahu, right, and Foreign Minister and Kadima party leader Tzipi Livni. Livni might be able to run for Israel's top job, but she can't have her face on a Jerusalem billboard. Dozens of election signs with her image have been vandalized, with Livni painted over or scratched out. Pictures of her male rivals have been left untouched.

EZBT ABED RABBO, Gaza Strip — The Israeli soldiers outside Majdi Abed Rabbo's home were after the three Hamas fighters holed up next door, and they wanted Abed Rabbo to be their point man.

For the next 24 hours, Abed Rabbo said, the soldiers repeatedly forced him to walk through the battle zone to see whether the militants were dead or alive.

Abed Rabbo wasn't alone. Eight other residents in this northern Gaza Strip neighborhood told McClatchy Newspapers in separate interviews that Israeli soldiers had conscripted them to check homes for booby traps, to smash holes in the walls of houses so that soldiers could use them as escape routes or to try to pull dead Palestinian militants from the rubble.

Conscripting Palestinians during the recent fighting in Gaza would appear to violate not only international law, but also Israel's court-imposed ban on using civilians as human shields.

"The laws of war make it clear you must distinguish between civilians and combatants and you cannot force a civilian to take on a combat role," said Daniel Reisner, a legal scholar who spent nearly a decade as the head of the Israeli military's international law department. "Using a human shield is illegal."

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2008704386_gaza04.html