The Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor documented several identical testimonies regarding the Israeli occupation army’s deliberate use of Palestinian civilians as human shields against their will and placing them in conditions that posed a threat to their lives. To secure and protect its forces and military operations inside and around the Shifa Medical Complex in Gaza City, which have been continuing since dawn last Monday.

Euro-Med confirmed in a statement that the testimonies it collected show that the Israeli forces used sick and displaced civilians inside the Shifa Medical Complex as human shields and exploited them, whether to fortify its military operations inside the hospital, or to form a cover behind its forces and military vehicles, or to send them under threat to homes and residential buildings in the vicinity. The medical complex, to ask its residents to evacuate, before the Israeli army carried out raids, arrested some of its residents, and then destroyed many of them.

“K.F” (who requested that his name not be revealed), a displaced Palestinian who was present in the Shifa Medical Complex, said that the Israeli forces ordered him and three other young men to enter several rooms inside the Shifa Medical Complex, after cameras were fixed on their heads, and forced them to move by issuing orders to them remotely towards specific places to examine them.

He added that he was forced to move on orders from the Israeli army in the general surgery building within the Shifa Medical Complex for several continuous hours, before he was forcibly evacuated with his wife and child, while nothing is known about the fate of the other young men who were used by the Israeli army as human shields in the same incident.

He pointed out that the Israeli army burned several buildings inside the Shifa Complex, including medicine stores, and gathered hundreds of patients and displaced people in one building while carrying out numerous field executions in several places inside the complex.

Detention inside vehicles

For his part, the elderly man, “M.N.”, who is in his sixties, said that the Israeli army forced his eldest son to enter the basements of the Shifa Complex and the sewage areas, while he saw other detainees who were placed inside armored vehicles during the fighting, and others who were forced to stand behind the army forces and its military vehicles. Positioned on the outskirts of the entrances to the complex, to fortify it and prevent any targeting.

While the wife of a nurse who was forced by the Israeli army to evacuate the compound without him towards the city of Deir al-Balah in the central Gaza Strip reported to the Euro-Med team that she saw the Israeli forces using her husband as a human shield in order to open the doors of sections in the Shifa complex over the course of several continuous hours, indicating that her husband’s fate is still pending. Anonymous, and she fears being liquidated.

Evacuating homes

In this context, members of several families living in the vicinity of the Shifa Complex reported that the Israeli army used young men who were arrested from within the Shifa Complex to enter their homes in order to ask them to vacate them immediately and move to the center and south of the Gaza Strip.

A woman from the “Arafat family” told the Euro-Med team that they were surprised by the entry of a young man in his late thirties who was stripped of his clothes except for his underwear, and he told them that the Israeli army had sent him to evacuate the house within 30 minutes or else it would be bombed above their heads, explaining that when they left the house In implementation of the evacuation request, they saw a number of young Palestinian men in the same condition, as army forces forced them to enter neighboring houses to warn their residents.

Last Monday, the Israeli army stormed the Al-Shifa complex, west of Gaza City, amid heavy gunfire and the flight of drones, which led to hundreds of deaths and injuries and the arrest of hundreds of others, in addition to destroying and burning dozens of residential homes adjacent to the complex after storming them.

The Observatory confirmed that the testimonies it collected show that the Israeli army kept and continues to keep a number of detainees from inside the Al-Shifa Complex for days on end in combat zones, for the purpose of using them as human shields and making the locations where its forces and vehicles are gathered safe from military operations.