Western media never tire of citing the atrocities of Hamas while diminishing and justifying the killing of tens of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, even when the majority of them are women and children. But how accurate is this portrayal of events?

My name is Craig Nielsen and I am a born again, evangelical Christian, living in Adelaide, South Australia. My father was a police officer and served in the 2nd A.I.F. for 6 years in WW2. Family members have served in Australia’s armed forces from Gallipoli and the Somme to the Owen Stanley Ranges in New Guinea.

For the last 15 or 16 years, I have been intensely interested in the Israel-Palestine conflict. From both religious and political perspectives, I have tried to educate myself about the conflict by reading books and articles from acknowledged sources as well as visiting the West Bank and Israel on two separate occasions. The number of public lectures and speak-outs that I have attended has long been greater than I can remember.

In 2013, I went on a three-week guided tour of the West Bank organised by an NGO (APHEDA). A group of about 12 of us travelled all around the West Bank visiting the site of house demolitions, checkpoints and, of course, the settlements. We had planned to visit some of the towns in Israel just near Gaza, but Hamas had been launching rockets in to the area and it was thought to be not safe for us to get near Gaza. It was a great disappointment as I remember it.

During the 2014-2015 Christmas/New Year period, I spent three months working as a volunteer human rights observer in the West Bank. This was part of a long-term program run by the World Council of Churches that is still operating in the West Bank today. It basically works by teams of people from a wide range of nationalities living in 7 different placements in the West Bank. Each placement has about 6 or 7 people in it and they spend 3 months monitoring checkpoints, agricultural gates and house demolitions. They also provide protective presence for Palestinian children and farmers from attacks by Israeli settlers. This program has been going now for nearly 25 years and has provided a continuous presence with detailed documentation of what life under the occupation is like and how it negatively effects all Palestinians in the West Bank.

It was during this visit that I first started trying to get information about Hamas and its use of Palestinian civilians as human shields. There is no doubt that Hamas has engaged in activities that are against International Humanitarian Law and have earned themselves the title of terrorist organisation. More will be said of this later.

Back then, while I was on placement, I contacted groups like the International Red Cross, Save the Children Fund as well as Palestinian legal organisations that represent children in detention, to find out about Hamas’ use of children as human shields in particular. No matter how hard I tried I was not able to find any evidence of such actions. Hamas does not operate in the West Bank and I felt that I would not be hindered by any pro-Hamas groups in my investigations. Though I had been assured by some Jewish Israelis that they had video evidence of Hamas using women and children as human shields, no such evidence ever seemed to turn up to be verified. It could be argued that my investigation was not thorough enough but, in the end, all I can say is that despite my best efforts, I couldn’t find any real evidence.

What I did find was clear evidence of Israeli soldiers using Palestinians as human shields. I heard this directly in face-to-face interviews with ex-Israeli soldiers from the group, “Breaking the Silence”. They said that this activity was widespread not only in Gaza, but even in the West Bank, for instance, in Hebron.

To understand the logic behind the use of human shields is not difficult, but needs to be explained as it will help in discussing and evaluating arguments made about this illegal practice.

The basic principle behind human shield use is to deter enemy fire by placing individuals or groups of people in the line of enemy fire so as to protect the lives of combatants from that enemy fire. The most obvious way to do this is to place people in front of yourself or your own military equipment, that you know your enemy is reluctant to fire on because of the high probability of hitting one of their own people. A human shield can only be effective in deterring enemy fire if the enemy is reluctant to injure or kill the person being used as the human shield in the first place. It would not be much point using an Israeli citizen as a human shield against fire from Hamas! It would also not be much use if you used a Palestinian as a human shield if Hamas, or any Palestinian armed group for that matter, had a basic contempt even for the lives of Palestinians themselves that live in Gaza!

In the current conflict in Gaza, there is overwhelming, unequivocal evidence of the widespread use of Palestinians as human shields by the Israeli military. This involves handcuffing Palestinians to military vehicles that might be a target for attacks from Hamas. Videos showing Palestinians tied to the bonnet of Israeli military vehicles have been seen by millions on the internet. Israeli soldiers have been filmed pushing Palestinians in front of themselves with the Israeli soldiers resting their weapons on the shoulders of the helpless person being used as a shield. Footage from drones, show Palestinians, stripped to their underwear and with hands tied behind their backs, being force to enter buildings which are expected to be booby trapped. Clear footage, from the West Bank, shows Israeli soldiers holding a child, no older than 7, in front of themselves in order to deter Palestinians from attacking them.

All of these are clear cut cases of using people as human shields and constitute a war crime. The number of documented cases of this behaviour by Israeli soldiers is enormous.

The point that I am trying to make here is that the widespread use of Palestinians as human shields by Israeli soldiers, directly implies that Israeli soldiers believe that Palestinian civilians can be effectively used as human shields against Hamas. Otherwise the practice would have been abandoned long ago. It seems that Israeli soldiers must believe that Hamas will not fire on them if it means injuring or killing their fellow citizens of Gaza. This is a significant point.

The appalling death toll of Palestinian civilians in the current conflict in Gaza is routinely dismissed and/or justified by Israel and the West by blaming the death toll on the behaviour of Hamas. They say that Hamas occupies schools, hospitals, universities and other civilian buildings deliberately using the civilians in these buildings as human shields. U.S. President Joe Biden has affirmed this, saying that Hamas shows utter contempt even for its own people.

But how does this sit with the facts as they can be verified? For a start, we see no evidence of this alleged contempt for Palestinian life as evidenced by the use of Palestinians as human shields by Israeli soldiers as just mentioned. It indeed seems strange that Hamas has no problem with sacrificing 40,000 civilians, over two thirds of them women and children, to Israeli bombing and shelling, but gets squeamish when Israeli soldiers use people from the same group as human shields!

The evidence given by healthcare workers and journalists is illuminating with regards to this point as well. Literally hundreds of healthcare workers and journalists have been killed by Israeli forces. This would ordinarily constitute a war crime but once again the Israelis claim that Hamas somehow uses these people as human shields as well. There is extensive video evidence from healthcare workers that they have never seen Hamas fighters in any hospital at all before, during or even after they have been bombed. One healthcare worker said that if she or any of her colleagues even saw Hamas fighters hanging around a hospital, they would have immediately sought shelter elsewhere as they would consider themselves in immediate danger of being targeted by Israeli armed forces. A similar statement has been made by numerous journalists and reporters who have been on the ground in Gaza. If they knew Hamas was in a certain area, they would not go there for fear of being killed by the IDF.

Israelis and their allies claim that Hamas has made tunnels under hospitals, schools, churches and mosques. The trouble with this claim is that clear cut evidence of “Hamas-made” tunnels under such structures has not been forthcoming.

The Gaza strip is a tiny piece of real-estate, covering about 365 square kilometres. My home town, Adelaide, covering the CBD and metropolitan suburbs covers about 10 times as much area but has less than half the population. The tunnel system that Hamas has created consists of about 600km of passages down to a depth of 40 metres. In such a small area with so many people, it would be hard not to have any tunnels near civilian infrastructure. I once asked a supporter of Israel where Hamas should store their weapons and he told me that they should put them all out in an open field! Not a very good strategy I’m afraid.

It is also hard to imagine why Hamas would bother with a policy of using the civilian population of Gaza as human shields for another obvious reason. That reason is that it just doesn’t work! The Israelis have not shown any sign of being deterred from dropping bombs in areas where women and children are in large numbers. Gazan civilians are the most ineffective human shields imaginable! If the Israelis were truly bothered by killing civilians in the quest to destroy Hamas, we would have found that very few Hamas fighters had been killed as well as a very small number of Gazan civilians on the death toll. The fact that the opposite is true is significant. When the Israelis find what they deem a legitimate target, such as a Hamas fighter or a Hamas associate, they do not hesitate to eliminate that target as well as their whole family and anyone else unlucky enough to be around at the time. The “Daddy is home” protocol is a case in point that proves this very phenomenon.

While it would not be impossible to find people in Gaza who do not support Hamas, the fact is that Hamas still enjoys a large amount of popular support in Gaza. For this, Israelis also claim that ordinary Gazan’s deserve whatever they get. Do they honestly imagine that any Gazan would prefer their occupiers and oppressors in the form of Israel, over Hamas or any other armed group?

It is hard to imagine how Hamas could maintain any type of support from the civilian population of Gaza, if they were forcing people to act as human shields or deliberately putting them in danger without them knowing it at the time. The fact that no real evidence of credible civilians from Gaza, acting as whistle-blowers, telling the rest of the world that they personally know of plans of Hamas to use civilians as human shields, have been found, is significant.

The population of Gaza has about 50% of it being children. The number of children that make up the death toll approximates this percentage. This is consistent with a bombing campaign that is indiscriminate.

Israel has repeatedly and emphatically stated that they will not allow a Palestinian state to exist and hence they will never give up the occupied territories. When I visited the West Bank myself, this was exactly the impression that I got from everyday Israelis. While the rest of the world refers to the recently created Israeli enclaves in the West Bank as settlements, the Israelis refer to them simply as Israeli towns. Tourist maps of Israel that I purchased in the West Bank showed one united land with no sign of “occupied territories”. All was Israel. When we came across the Allenby Bridge from Jordan to the West Bank, Israeli authorities at the border said very politely, “Welcome to Israel”.

A question, never asked in the parliaments of my country is, “Given that Israel will never release Palestinians from the oppression of the illegal occupation of their home lands, what should the Palestinians themselves do?”.

International law gives any people the right to resist the illegal occupation of their homes even to the point of armed conflict. This absolutely applies to the case of Palestine as well. While the right to resist is guaranteed, not all resistance is legal. The targeting of non-combatants or the indiscriminate use of force with respect to combatants and non-combatants, are both considered war crimes or acts of terrorism. There is absolutely no doubt that Hamas has crossed these lines. I have four points to make following these facts.

The first is that the actions of Hamas, or any other armed resistance group, do not make the occupation of the West bank and Gaza legal. Israel must end the occupation.

Secondly, Hamas or any other armed resistance group are not the root cause of the Israel Palestine conflict. Rather these groups are the product of the occupation and the oppression suffered by the Palestinian people and the abandonment of their cause by the international community. With no one else to fight their cause, groups like Hamas will obviously fill the vacuum.

Thirdly, the motivation for Palestinian resistance is because of the occupation and the ethnic cleansing of the 800,000 Palestinians during the Nakba in 1948. End the occupation, resolve the problem of the refugees and all armed resistance will end. 57 Arab and Muslim nations, along with Hamas, Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad have all vowed to guaranteed Israel’s security as a nation if Israel will end the occupation and resolve the refugee issue. Israel refuses.

Lastly, there is incontrovertible and overwhelming evidence that Israel has committed war crimes even just in the recent Gaza conflict. As just one example here, 45 medical doctors from the U.S. who have been working in Gaza, signed a statement, along with medical and forensic evidence that they have come across dozens of pre-teen Palestinian children who have been killed clearly by Israeli snipers. The forensic evidence is clear showing precise head and chest wounds that have been made only by sniper fire from Israeli Defence personal. Video footage of women and children being shot and killed by Israeli snipers has been made.

This evidence has been shown to President Joe Biden who has deliberately ignored the facts.

The evidence of the targeting of children mentioned above is just one of dozens of examples of where the IDF has committed war crimes. My point is that if we name Hamas as a terrorist organisation them we must do the same for the IDF.

In any conflict, the most powerful side also has the most power to create peace. The action of Hamas on October the 7thwas brutal and shocking, but somehow not surprising. These actions were a work of desperation and last resort by a group that knows as a fact what the West chooses to ignore. This fact is that the Israeli government acts with vicious brutality towards all Palestinians, men, women and children whenever they feel they can with total impunity. The 2019 protests in Gaza know as “The Right of Return March” is a recent case in point where hundreds of completely peaceful Palestinian protesters were gunned down by Israeli snipers. This included dozens of children, more children than were killed by Hamas on October the 7th but the West was completely uninterested in reporting this crime by Israel.

The Australian media gleefully reported every unfounded stitch of atrocity propaganda that they could manage after October the 7th. Atrocity propaganda is designed to so demonise the alleged perpetrators that the general public will not have any resistance to any type of horror inflicted on the alleged perpetrators. It is a time-honoured practice by all sides and so any even remotely educated person should be sceptical about reports of babies being cooked, beheaded, mass rapes of women and babies being cut out of pregnant women’s bodies.

It is not that these things don’t occur in war, unfortunately they do and even happening once is one time too many, but since this type of propaganda is so popular we need to have a high level of evidence to support it. To say that this evidence was lacking would be a huge understatement. It is quite clear that these accusations were, in fact, complete lies.

Because of the horrible nature of war, I would never say emphatically that no rapes ever occurred, but it is plainly clear that no evidence of the slaughter of babies and the mass rapes of hundreds of Israeli women has ever been provided. Numerous groups have looked through hours and hours of footage supplied by people from the Nova concert, Israeli soldiers and even the footage from Hamas fighters, and concluded that there is no evidence of mass rapes and baby beheadings.

By the very nature of atrocity propaganda, admissions of errors made in reported facts afterwards are irrelevant. The point of the propaganda is to mobilise hatred and vengeance towards the perpetrators straight away.

One of the reasons why the ICJ was created was to determine if genocide and other crimes against humanity have, or are, being committed by a state in the course of a conflict. After careful deliberation on the evidence pertaining to the Gaza conflict, they have found a plausible case for genocide by the Israeli government. My country and its untrustworthy media have ignored this finding. Only the foolish ignore evidence like this.

We need to stand by the findings of the International Court of Justice and be ready to stand up for justice and peace in the Middle East. We also need to be exceptionally sceptical of the statements of our government and our mainstream media.

Their track record speaks volumes.

https://johnmenadue.com/atrocity-propaganda-hamas-human-shields-and-genocide/

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

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