On December 21, 2018, Congress passed a law requiring the White House, within a year, to designate and sanction individuals responsible for the deliberate placement of military installations amid civilian populations. The act specifies Hamas and Hizballah by name. But the Trump administration has let the act’s deadline come and go without producing a list. Orde Kittrie explains why implementing the law can make a difference:
U.S. law and the U.S. Department of Defense’s Law of War Manual explicitly prohibit U.S. service members from using human shields. By contrast, terrorists and other non-state actors, including al-Qaeda, Hamas, Hizballah, Islamic State, and the Taliban, have repeatedly used human shields against U.S., Israeli, and other allied armed forces. Tactically, terrorists use human shields to cause Western militaries to impose restraints [on their own soldiers] beyond those required by the law of armed conflict. These restraints put at risk the lives of Western troops and render them less effective in defending their citizens.
For Hamas and Hizballah, a core element of their campaigns to delegitimize Israel involves using human shields, which is itself a war crime, and then falsely accusing the Israel Defense Forces of deliberately killing innocent civilians when the IDF targets hostile personnel and their facilities.
Kittrie notes the example of the “March of Return”—weekly violent disturbances Hamas organized at the Gaza-Israel border from the spring of 2018 until the end of 2019:
Yahya Sinwar [the head of the Hamas government in the Strip] declared in spring 2018 that the March was designed to generate civilian casualties, stating, “When we decided to embark on these marches, we decided to turn that which is most dear to us—the bodies of our women and children—into a dam blocking the collapse in Arab reality, a dam to prevent the racing of many Arabs towards the normalization of ties with the plundering entity.”
Designating and sanctioning Sinwar and other Hamas leaders for their human-shields use—a war crime under international law—could lead to follow-on sanctions by the European Union, the United Kingdom, and other U.S. allies. Naming Sinwar and other leaders of Hamas’ “political” wing for human-shields violations would help counter the flawed view (reflected, for example, in UK policy) that Hamas political leaders are separate from the group’s military wing, less involved in objectionable activity, and should not be sanctioned.
Read more on FDD: https://www.fdd.org/2020/10/15/time-to-act-on-human-shields/