A human shield is a non-combatant (or a group of non-combatants) who either volunteers or is forced to shield a target in order to deter the enemy from attacking it. The 20th and 21st centuries had numerous operations that used involuntary human shields. Use of voluntary human shields have also had use, particularly with Mahatma Gandhi using the concept as a tool of resistance.
Legal background
A human shield is a non-combatant (or a group of non-combatants) who either volunteers or is forced to shield a legitimate military target in order to deter the enemy from attacking it. Forcing protected persons to serve as human shields is a war crime according to the 1949 Geneva Conventions, the 1977 Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions, and the 1998 Rome Statute. The term is also used when combatants place themselves in or conduct military activity from locations with non-combatants nearby, making it difficult for the enemy to attack without endangering the non-combatants.
Under Article 28 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, it is prohibited to use civilians to render military objectives immune from attack. This prohibition includes human shields under customary international law and Article 51(7) of the 1977 Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions.Int’l Comm. of the Red Cross, Rule 97, IHL Database: Customary IHL, https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/customary-ihl/eng/docs/v1_rul. The law specifically holds that medical units shall not be used in an attempt to shield military objectives from attack.Protocol Additional to the Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949 and relating to the Protection of Victims of Int’l Armed Conflict art. 51(7), June 8, 1977, 1125 U.N.T.S. 3 [hereinafter Additional Protocol I]. Using civilians as human shields may constitute a war crime.Art. 8(2)(b)(xxiii) of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. But even in the case of a breach of international humanitarian law by one party, all parties remain bound by their IHL obligations.Nils Melzer, Int’l Comm. of the Red Cross, Interpretive Guidance on the Notion of Direct Participation in Hostilities under Int’l Humanitarian Law, 2009, http://www.icrc.org/eng/assets/files/other/icrc_002_0990.pdf.
According to law professor Eliav Lieblich, "Armed groups might be responsible for harm that they occasion to civilians under their control. But to argue that this absolves the other party from responsibility is to get both law and morality wrong."
Law professor Adil Ahmad Haque states that involuntary shields "retain their legal and moral protection from intentional, unnecessary, and disproportionate harm". He argues against the position of the United States Department of Defense (as well as the United Kingdom and some scholars) that attackers may discount or disregard collateral harm in determining proportionality and states that these views are "legally baseless and morally unsound".
Authors Neve Gordon and Nicola Perugini, elaborating on their book, Human Shields: A History of People in the Line of Fire, discuss "proximate shields", humans as shields merely due to proximity to belligerents and assert that this type has become "by far the most prominent type of shield in contemporary discourse". They say that the proximate shielding accusation has been used by states to cover-up war crimes against civilian populations and that human rights organizations frequently fail to question this charge which they claim is being improperly used to justify civilian deaths.
Involuntary human shields The use of human shields an be traced to the Ancient era; for example they were used by Ancient Greeks.
20th century
World War I Article 23 of the 1907 Hague Convention (IV) states that "A belligerent is forbidden to compel the nationals of the hostile party to take part in the operations of war directed against their own country".Convention respecting the laws and customs of war on land (1907): Parties . The 1915 report says "If it be not permissible to compel a man to fire on his fellow citizens, neither can he be forced to protect the enemy and to serve as a living screen".
Italian invasion of Ethiopia During the Second Italo-Ethiopian War, the army of Fascist Italy systematically bombed medical facilities in Ethiopia operated by various Red Cross societies. Italy accused Ethiopia of using hospitals to hide weapons and fighters.
1936–1939 Arab revolt in Palestine In the British mandate of Palestine, Arab civilians and rebels who were captured by the British during the Great Arab Revolt were frequently taken and placed on "pony trucks", "on which hostages could be made to sit"; these were placed at the front of trains to deter other rebels from detonating explosives on the railways.Eugene Rogan, The Arabs: A History, 2012 p.255.Charles Anderson, 'When Palestinians Became Human Shields: Counterinsurgency, Racialization, and the Great Revolt (1936–1939),' Comparative Studies in Society and History 2021, vol. 63 issue 3 625–654. A soldier with the Manchester Regiment described the technique: They would "go down to Acre jail and borrow say five rebels, three rebels, and you'd sit them on the bonnet, so the guy up in the hill could see an Arab on the truck so he wouldn't blow it... If [the rebel] was unlucky the truck coming up behind would hit him. But nobody bothered to pick the bits up. They were left."apology sought for British war crimes in Palestine,' BBC News 7 September 2022.
The practice began on 24 September 1936 when Brigadier J. F. Evetts reacted to Palestinian rebel attacks against British positions in Nablus by forcing the city mayor, Suleiman Abdul Razzaq Tuqan, to sit exposed on the roof of a garrison building under fire, as a 'high-value human shield'. Tuqan returned his Order of the British Empire commendation in protest.Anderson, 2021 p.625
World War II On 14 August 1937, in what historians Evgenia Vlasova and Lianggang Sun refer to as "the first major battle of World War II in Asia" in Asia between China and the occupying forces of the Empire of Japan at the Battle of Shanghai, the Imperial Japanese Navy berthed their flagship Izumo in front of the Shanghai International Settlement; it is believed in what would become known as "Black Saturday", Chinese Air Force Gamma 2E bomber pilots targeted the Japanese warship, but had to release the bombs at a much lower altitude than they usually trained for due to low cloud ceiling, and did not properly reset their bomb sights, which resulted in two of the 1,100 lb bombs falling short and landing on the adjacent International Settlement (one failing to explode) and killing at least 950 Chinese civilians, foreigners and refugees.
After World War II, it was claimed by SS general Gottlob Berger that there was a plan, proposed by the Luftwaffe and approved by Adolf Hitler, to set up special POW camps for captured airmen of the Royal Air Force and the United States Army Air Forces in large German cities, to act as human shields against their bombing raids. Berger realized that this would contravene the 1929 Geneva Convention and argued that there was not enough barbed wire—as a result, this plan was not implemented.Berger statement to Allied intelligence officers, Nuremberg, October 19, 1945.
Wehrmacht and later SS forces extensively used Polish civilians as human shields during Warsaw Uprising when attacking the insurgents' positions. Adam Borkiewicz: Powstanie warszawskie. Zarys działań natury wojskowej. Warszawa: Instytut wydawniczy PAX, 1969, p. 99Antoni Przygoński: Powstanie warszawskie w sierpniu 1944 r. T. I. Warszawa: PWN, 1980, p. 242. . In the Wola massacre in Poland on 7 August 1944, the Nazis forced civilian women onto the armored vehicles as human shields to enhance their effectiveness.
In Belgium in May 1940, at least 86 civilians were killed by the German Wehrmacht in an event known as the Vinkt Massacre, when the Germans took 140 civilians and used them as shields to cross a bridge while under fire by Belgian forces. As the battle progressed, German soldiers began executing hostages.
During the Battle of Okinawa and the Battle of Manila, Japanese soldiers often used civilians as human shields against American troops.
When the Japanese were concerned about the incoming Allied air raids on their home islands as they were losing their controlled Pacific islands one by one to the Allies in the Pacific War, they scattered major military installations and factories throughout urban areas. Historians argued that this meant Japan was using its civilians as human shields to protect their legitimate military targets against Allied bombardment. As a result, the U.S. Army Air Forces (USAAF) was unable to strike purely military targets due to the limitations of their bombsight, the mixing of military installations and factories with urban areas, and the widespread cottage industry in Japan's cities. This led the USAAF in early 1945 to switch from precision bombing to carpet bombing, which destroyed 67 Japanese cities with incendiary bombs, and ultimately led to the use of atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Algerian War In 1960s Algeria, during the Algerian War, France used civilians as hostages and human shields in its fight against the National Liberation Army."Algeria: Renewed calls for France to recognize colonial crimes". Middle East Monitor. November 5, 2019.
Iraqi–Kurdish conflict In 1963, a Ba'athist tank unit in Kirkuk covered its assault on a Kurdish suburb with a human shield of Kurdish women and children.Herbert David Croly: "The New Republic", Vol. 203, 1990, p. 15
Korean War In the Battle of the Notch, North Korean forces were claimed to have used captured U.S. soldiers as human shields while advancing.
Lebanese Civil War In August 1976, at the Siege of Tel al-Zaatar, Christian Lebanese militias alleged that the Palestinians at Tel al-Zaatar were using Lebanese families inside the camp as human shields."Over 1,000 Flee Beirut Refugee Camp Under Fire". Associated Press, Beirut, Lebanon. Clarion-Ledger from Jackson, Mississippi, page 14, August 9, 1976.
1982 Lebanon War