Israel forces killed Gaza couple in their 80s after using them as human shields, probe finds

Israel used 2 elderly Palestinians as human shields in Gaza

Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor interviewed the family of Mohammed Fahmi Abu Hussein and his wife Mazyounah, two elderly Palestinian civilians, who Israel used as human shields, strapping explosives to them, during their… pic.twitter.com/ioNoHGwRrC

— Middle East Monitor (@MiddleEastMnt) February 20, 2025

Israeli occupation forces shot and killed an elderly Palestinian couple in Gaza after forcing the man to act as a human shield, an investigation has revealed.

According to Israeli news outlet HaMakom, which cited unnamed Israeli soldiers who informed it of the incident which took place in May last year, troops from various brigades surrounded a house in Gaza City’s Zeitoun neighbourhood, belonging to a Palestinian couple reportedly at least in their 80s.

Occupation forces then strapped explosives around the husband’s neck and warned him they would “blow off his head” if he did not search buildings in the area to check if they were booby-trapped for Israeli soldiers.

As one Israeli soldier told the outlet, after explosives were put around the Palestinian man’s neck, he was told that “if he does something wrong or not the way we want, the person behind him will pull the rope and his head will detach from the body”. The soldier recalled that

he walked around with us for eight hours, even though he’s an 80-year-old man and even though he couldn’t run away from us. And that’s knowing that there’s a soldier behind him who can pull the rope at any second – and he’s done.

Following the forced procedure of having him enter homes and an alleged Hamas tunnel, the Israeli occupation soldiers then ordered him and his wife to leave the area and head to Al-Mawasi, where hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were being herded to at the time.

The troops did not inform other battalions that the elderly couple would be making their way to that area, however, leading to Israeli forces shooting them dead just a hundred metres from where they were released. As another soldier put it, “they died like that, in the street.”

The use of the man as a human shield and the killing of the Palestinian couple are the latest such Israeli war crimes to be revealed in Gaza, with other similar reports of occupation forces’ use of human shields and executions being a rampant occurrence.

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The human shield tactic in particular is reportedly part of a long-standing policy known as the ‘mosquito protocol’, in which Israeli occupation soldiers order Palestinian civilians to enter potentially dangerous structures and locations ahead of occupation troops.

According to HaMakom, the Israeli military on Saturday denied the war crimes against the 80-year-old Palestinian man and his wife, as well as rejecting the existence of the mosquito protocol.

One Israeli soldier is reported by the site to have refuted the military’s denial, telling it that the protocol is “something from the battalion commander’s level and lower. It goes down as a regulated order, and somewhere at the level of the brigade commander they deny it completely. When they start making problems, they pass the responsibility down and they say not to do it.”

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