Gaza schoolboys 'forced to be Israel's human shields'

Palestinians as young as 12 say they had to search houses for militants and tunnels, sometimes dressed in military fatigues, in a practice an Israeli NGO warns is 'systemic'

- BEL TREW

Sobbing and terrified, the 12-year-old Palestinian schoolboy says Israeli soldiers ordered him and his cousins to strip down to their underwear, before forcing them at gunpoint to act as “human shields”.

It was late December 2023 in the Tuffah neighbourhood of Gaza City that had become an epicentre of Israel’s ferocious assault on the strip, following Hamas’s 7 October attacks. After the Israeli military issued an evacuation order for the area, the male members of the families who lived in the same building left under heavy fire, searching for shelter.

That left only the women and children, cowering in their homes when a dozen soldiers raided the building, Shadi, whose name has been changed to protect his identity, tells The Independent.

“We were so scared when they entered, we were screaming as we tried to run from room to room to hide,” says the seventhgrade student, now 13 years old, who still has vivid nightmares that soldiers will take him, and is often too scared to go to the toilet on his own. “They took a group of us, me and my cousins, blindfolded us and tied our hands. I was terrified. I was shaking with fear. My mother was crying but couldn’t do anything. They were standing over us with their guns.”

By phone, The Independent spoke to two of the boys, who were aged between 11 and 16 years old, and their parents, who say they were beaten, threatened with dogs and stripped to their boxer shorts despite the freezing winter conditions.

“They took us and put us on the road in front of their vehicles and then asked us if we knew any of the [Palestinian militants] to tell them we are here,” says another of the boys, Ahmed, whose name has also been changed.