The use of Palestinian civilians as human shields

Ma'an
Part 15 of a series recounting the findings of South African jurist Richard Goldstone's UN Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict.

At midnight on 10 January 2009, Israeli soldiers violently entered the home of Mahmoud Al-Ajrami, where he and his wife were sheltering underneath the stairs.

Soldiers threw a grenade and entered the house shooting. What Al-Ajrami says transpired over the next 48 hours left him with two fractured vertebrae as a result of beatings, and was one of four cases in which civilians were used as human shields that Richard Goldstone's UN inquiry investigated.

These civilians were allegedly forced to enter houses at gunpoint in front of or, in one case, instead of soldiers. Two incidents took place east of Jabaliya.

The case of Mahmoud Al-Ajrami

Al-Ajrami, a former foreign minister, testified in Gaza City last June. He resigned when Hamas took over and has not worked since. He, his wife and 15-year-old daughter lived in a house west of Beit Lahiya. His home was directly hit for the first time on 2 or 3 January 2009, according to him by tank shells and by missiles fired by Apache helicopters, which seriously damaged external and internal walls.

"I don't know why the Israeli army did what it did, especially since I was in a civilian house. There wasn't one bullet fired from my house or from the neighboring houses," he recounted. "And I asked this question to one of the officers later ... this question still challenges me."

Tanks that came into the area were initially positioned around 500 meters north of his house. As he told Goldstone, Al-Ajrami had decided not to leave because of his father's experience of leaving his home in Israel and not being able to return. But he decided that this was proving too difficult for his daughter. He called a taxi and his daughter moved to the house of an uncle in a safer area.

"The soldiers came in while firing and guns shooting. ... At one point we were facing them, so I started talking to them in a loud voice, telling them, 'we are here, we are the owners of this house, we are civilians,' and my wife was saying more or less the same. ..."

An officer ordered Al-Ajrami to lift his robe (he was in nightclothes) and turn around. "I was there with my wife, wearing pajamas and bathrobes, because this was January and you know it's very cold, and these are the coldest days of the year in Palestine," he said.

"One of them – actually there were about 20 to 25 soldiers inside the house, and like I said, we were in the corner, although we tried to get closer to them – and one of them yelled at us in broken Arabic and I couldn't understand him ... So when I got closer to him, he pointed his gun at me with the laser beam, of course, pointing at me, so I moved my hands and said, 'please, just stop, stop, don't shoot. I don't understand what you need, what you want.' ...

"His first question was 'what are you doing here,' and I said, 'this is my house, this is my home and it's quite natural to be at home, and I don't know, frankly speaking, what are you doing here, because my presence here is natural, your presence is not natural.' So he insulted me, using extremely crude words and he said, 'you have to remove your shirt, turn around.' I did, and he – maybe he expected me to be carrying a bomb ... Then he asked me to move ahead. ...

They were then taken to a neighboring house where soldiers took his ID card and checked it on a laptop.

"And then he said, 'well, you're going to stay with us' and he started then asking the questions, 'I'm gonna give you five minutes and then you will have to tell us in detail where is [captured Israeli soldier] Gilad Shalit. Where are the Hamas tunnels located and where are the Hamas militants, where are the rockets' and so on."

Al-Ajrami responded that he could not provide that information because he did not know, that he was previously a member of the Fatah administration. "So he said, 'well, I'll come back to you.' ... He told me, 'if you don't speak we will take you and we will kill you,' and I remember exactly what he said, 'if you don't talk we will take you and shoot you,' and he repeated the same sentence over and over again. So I said, 'I don't have any information. I don't know what I can tell you.'" ....

.........Al-Ajlami was handcuffed and blindfolded. Two or three soldiers took him by the shoulders and forced him to walk in front of them. His wife tried to go with him but they pushed her back into the room. It was by now around 2am. "My wife had her hands tied, was hanging to my robe, and she said 'please take me with him' and she was screaming and she said, 'I'm not going to leave him, take me with him.' One of the soldiers pushed her back, so she fell on the ground and he said, 'no, you are not to move.' So I left.

'I thought they were going to shoot me'

The soldiers took Al-Ajlami up to the second floor of the building and threw him off. He landed on rubble and fainted. When he came to, he had severe pain in his right side and had difficulty breathing. He found out later that he had broken four ribs and he had severe bruising down his right leg...

....It was raining and still dark. Four soldiers forced him to stand. He was moaning with the pain but did not want them to hear. "I didn't want to scream. I tried to hold myself, I tried to restrain myself. They put me up and I had to walk but I was in extreme pain...."

The soldiers pushed him against a wall and walked away. He thought they were going to shoot him. He was still blindfolded. "I tried to look from underneath the blindfold, I saw the soldier's feet, and I heard [from a witness] later on that when they brought him to join me, he saw them holding their guns and pointing their guns at me and he thought that they were going to shoot me and shoot him also."

Early the next morning, the soldiers took him and another man (whom he subsequently found out to be his neighbor Abbas Halawa) and forced them to walk in front of them. Al-Ajrami was blindfolded and a gun was held to the back of his head........ Full story and photos from Jan. 10, 2009