 Radhika Coomaraswamy, the U.N. secretary-general’s envoy for protecting children in armed conflict |
TEL AVIV, Israel – The Israeli army has rejected as “baseless” U.N. claims that Jewish soldiers were permitted by rules of engagement to use civilians – including children – as human shields during the war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip.
The U.N. report also claimed Israeli soldiers shot Palestinian children, bulldozed a home with a woman and child still inside, and shelled a building they had ordered civilians into a day earlier.
The report, however, failed to obtain Israel’s side of the story. It also mostly did not include in the various scenarios Hamas’ use of civilians as human shields or reports of terrorists firing at Israeli troops from shelled buildings.
“Presenting Israel Defense Forces soldiers as using Palestinians as human shields is unreasonable,” the IDF said in a statement e-mailed to WND. “The instructions given to IDF soldiers forbid in clear terms such use, and presenting them as norms of engagement by the IDF is not true.”
IDF officials told WND the U.N. investigation was never presented to the Israeli army and U.N. human rights investigators did not ask for the Israeli side of the story.
“If any such report is presented, the IDF will respond appropriately,” one IDF spokesman said.
The 47-page U.N. report was compiled by Radhika Coomaraswamy, the U.N. secretary-general’s envoy for protecting children in armed conflict. It claimed that in January, IDF troops ordered an 11-year old the boy to walk in front of soldiers being fired on in the Gaza neighborhood of Tel al-Hawa and enter buildings before them.
Coomaraswarmy claimed the allegations against Israel were “verified” by U.N. human rights inspectors, but she did not explain how they were verified. She allowed that there had been allegations that Hamas used human shields, but U.N. human rights experts have yet to verify the claims, she said.
Indeed, in one of the cases cited by the U.N. – the shelling of a building with civilians inside – Hamas admitted it first fired rockets at Israeli civilian population zones from just outside the building.
The IDF routinely risks the lives of its soldiers by sending them into densely populated urban warfare zones to fight house-to-house instead of carpet bombing areas. The U.S., on the other hand, at times used carpet bombing in villages in Afghanistan instead of sending its soldiers house-to-house to flush out militants.
In one example, in July 2002, an American gunship attacked four villages in the Oruzgan province of Afghanistan. Local officials counted 54 dead, most of them women and children. On Dec. 29, 2002, U.S. forces reportedly destroyed an ammunition store in Niazi Qala from the air, along with parts of a village. Fifty-two Afghan civilians reportedly died, and six months later the village remained abandoned.
