Ideas - The one exception that makes killing civilians legal in war

Episode Date: May 7, 2025

International law is clear: warring parties cannot kill civilians. It's a war crime. But there is one exception. An attacker can justify killing them if they’re being used as a human shield, involuntarily. This means a belligerent could kill a civilian and claim, after the fact, they were being used as shields by the enemy. Increasingly, that justification has been applied to neighbourhoods, districts, even entire populations. IDEAS explores the long history of humans as shields and how this legal loophole has become a norm. Guests include Nicola Perugini, who teaches international relations at the University of Edinburgh. He is also co-author of Human Shields: A History of People in the Line of Fire. And Dr. Mimi Syed, an American emergency medicine physician who served two medical missions in Gaza in 2024.

When a body is discovered 10 miles out to sea, it sparks a mind-blowing police investigation. There's a man living in this address in the name of a deceased. He's one of the most wanted men in the world. This isn't really happening. Officers are finding large sums of money. It's a tale of murder, skullduggery and international intrigue. So who really is he? I'm Sam Mullins and this is Sea of Lies from CBC's Uncovered, available now.

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Okay, here's today's show. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayed. International humanitarian law, the law that regulates armed conflict is clear. Warring parties cannot kill civilians. But there is an exception. Despite civilians remaining protected, an attacker can justify killing them if they are being used as human shields. A human shield is a human used and deployed in a context of war as a shield for military operations or military objectives. The practice is likely as old as war itself, but the legal question about using non-combatants

to shield military targets first arose a little more than 150 years ago. Already in the second half of the 19th century, we start seeing and witnessing the first conversations about the laws of war and the protection of civilians, mainly prisoners, who might be used or have been used in context of war as shields for military activities, protecting as a buffer military targets. Human shields can also act voluntarily, when civilians choose to use their bodies to protect others in a conflict or by surrounding a building to protect those inside. But the law concerns itself specifically with those human shields who are used against

their will. And today, where there is war and conflict, there are people coerced into serving as human shields. The soldier says a 16-year-old boy and 20-year-old man were brought to his unit this spring. Their hands were tied behind their back, and they had a cloth over their eyes. The instructions from the intelligence officer who delivered them were clear. He told me to take them.

In the next attack, use them as a human shield. He told me that they have a connection to Hamas. One part of the law says human shield. He told me that they have a connection to Hamas. One part of the law says human shielding is a crime, while another part says killing them with some qualifications is legal. It makes everything a little slippery. Belligerence will kill civilians and justify it by claiming after the fact they were being used as shields by the enemy. And increasingly, that justification has been applied to neighborhoods, districts, even

entire populations. Ideas producer Naheed Mustafa looks at the history of humans as shields and how an exception to the law has become a norm. The long history of human shielding has morphed over time. Anthropologist and political scientist, Nicola Perugini, looks at how this practice has transformed from conflict to conflict. He spoke with me from his home in Scotland and begins the story with the American Civil War. We have the first instances and the first conversations between the military sector

and the legal sectors about the use of hostages or prisoners of war, especially in the South by the Confederate Army against the Union army to protect military objectives, more precisely in Charleston, which is one of the first instances of human shielding which triggered League of Debates that we have been able to document in the book. My name is Nicola Perugini and I teach international relations at the University of Edinburgh with a focus on the international politics of human rights and international law. In his book called Human Shields, A History of People in the Line of Fire, Perugini notes an incident that took place in mid-June 1864. It had been three years since the outbreak

of the American Civil War. The Charleston Mercury published an article about human shields in Charleston, South Carolina. The paper was owned by a family bent on saving the southern way of life, a life that included holding slaves. The Mercury played an important role in shaping public opinion. Charleston had been under siege for nearly a year by the time the paper ran the following article. For some time past, it has been known that a batch of Yankee prisoners, comprising the highest in rank now in our hands, were soon to be brought hither to share the pleasures of the bombardment. They accordingly arrived on Sunday. These prisoners, we understand,

will be furnished with comfortable quarters in that portion of the city, most exposed to the enemy's fire. The commanding Yankee officer on Morris Island will be duly notified of the fact of their presence in the Shell district, and if his batteries still continue their wanton and barbarous work, it will be at the peril of the captive officers. There followed an exchange of letters between generals of the opposing armies. To Major General John G. Foster, commanding U.S. forces coast of South Carolina. General. Five general officers and 45 field officers of the United States Army, coast of South Carolina. General. Five general officers and 45 field officers of the

United States Army, all of them prisoners of war, have been sent to this city. They have been turned over to Brigadier General Ripley, commanding 1st Military District of this department, who will see they are provided with commodious quarters in a part of the city occupied by non-combatants, the majority of whom are women and children. It is proper, however, that I should inform you that it is part of the city which has been for many months exposed day and night to the fire of your guns. Very respectfully, Your Obedient Servant Sam Jones, Major General Commanding, Charleston, South Carolina, June 13th, 1864.

A response followed three days later. To Major General Sam Jones. General, I have to acknowledge the receipt this day of your communication of the 13th instant informing me that five generals and 45 field officers of the U.S. Army, prisoners of war, have been sent to Charleston for safekeeping. Many months since, Major General Gilmore, U.S. Army, notified General Beauregard, then commanding at Charleston, that the city would be bombarded. This notice was given that noncombatants might be removed and thus women and children be

spared from harm. General Beauregard, in a communication to General Gilmore dated August 22nd, 1863, informed him that the non-combatant population of Charleston would be removed with all possible celerity. That women and children have been since retained by you in a part of the city which has been for many months exposed to fire, is a matter decided by your own sense of humanity. I must, however, protest against your action in thus placing defenseless prisoners of war in a position exposed to constant bombardment. It is an indefensible act of cruelty, and can be designed only to prevent the continuance of our fire of Charleston.

That city is a depot of military supplies. It contains not merely arsenals, but also foundries and factories for the manufacture of munitions of war. To destroy these means of continuing the war is therefore our object and duty. You seek to defeat this effort, not by means known to honorable warfare, but by placing unarmed and helpless prisoners under our fire. Prisoners of war are not passive actors in the battlefield, but the moment in which they surrender and they are captured, they become protected and they acquire a protected status. So for instance, in the case of Charleston but other wars also of the late 19th century, prisoners of war are civilians which are captured,

which are used in order to shield and protect certain kind of objectives. Therefore they trigger a legal conversation. In fact, in the history of human shielding, the first clear articulation of the figure of the human shield is in 1929 with the Convention on the Treatment of the Prisoners of War, in which for the first time prisoners of war are clearly defined as civilians or actors in the battlefield which are entitled to full protection and they cannot be deployed this is the language deployed to protect military objectives.

But then the Second World War happened and it changed everything. What happens in 1949 after World War II is that that specific clause that articulated the idea of prisoners of war as actors that cannot be used as human shields is projected onto the entirety of the civilian population and civilians. So what happens is that that specific clause of the convention on the treatment of the civilian population and civilians. So what happens is that that specific clause of the convention on the treatment of the prisoners of war is inherited and expanded in the Geneva conventions to be applied to all civilians. So we could say that in a way,

the prisoner of war is the seed of the protected passive civilian. That shift from only focusing on POWs to including civilians was pivotal for the human shielding conversation. After World War II, for the first time in history, with the beginning of international humanitarian law, the figure of the civilian is codified in full. There was no full codification of the figure of the civilian is codified in full. There was no full codification of the figure of the civilian before World War II.

There were traces, there were debates, there were treaties, but there wasn't a full and overall normative framework for the protection of civilians. After World War II, the civilian is codified and it's codified as a passive victim, as a subject that needs protection because it is not participating into the battle and because it is not involved in a battle. In fact, if a civilian ceases to be passive and take part into the hostilities, it loses

its basic protections and it becomes something else. That's also the debate surrounding the entire period that goes between the Geneva Conventions, 1945, and the additional protocols of 1977, which is the period of the decolonization era and the decolonization wars. In the decades between 1945 and 1977, the international community saw major expansion. More states became independent and joined the United Nations, the majority of them achieving their independence through war and armed resistance, in which civilians were not passive. So what we witness after World War II is a clash precisely between this idea of the civilian,

which is codified in international humanitarian law as a passive subject. And on the other hand, a subject which has been subjected and dehumanized, and it has been subjected to domination, and which is trying to liberate itself by becoming active, by getting involved into wars, which are wars of national liberation, in which combatants and civilians act together in order to achieve freedom.

The human shield question has a way of twisting in on itself. With the signing of Protocol One to the Geneva Conventions in 1977, using civilians for human shielding became a crime under international humanitarian law. But attacking areas where human shielding is taking place is not. An attacker can kill civilians who are being used in this way, as long as the principle of proportionality between civilian harm and military necessity is respected. Perugini says over time what started out as a way to protect civilian life transformed into a perilous reality. Nia is sick, years old. Yesterday her parents were killed when the war came to the hamlet without a name in Quang Ngai province. What it had was North Vietnamese troops shooting at Americans.

Three children were killed, along with Nia's mother and father, and another woman, caught in the crossfire of the fight over their hearts and minds. That was the first time she saw an American, freelance cameraman Douglas Sapper. Someone said, fire on it, kill it. We then, off to my left, I heard someone say, it looks like a kid. At this time I jumped up and started running towards where I had then recognized it to be a little girl walking between the Viet Cong fire and our own fire. I dashed forward, scooped her up in my arms and started running back in a zigzag fashion trying to avoid both the friendly fire and the enemy fire. Since there were very few survivors that we could locate, none of them related to her, why we felt it would just be better if I kept her. Precisely in the historical period we were mentioning, which is the war in Vietnam,

the period of decolonization wars, what happens is that Western powers tried to transform this human shielding clause and the prohibition of human shielding as a legal, into a legal tool that can be used in order to outlaw forms of warfare, which are precisely non-state forms of warfare in which rebels rather than guerrilla groups, rather than populations which are under occupation, try to fight back in order to become free. So the US administration transforms the Maoist doctrine of the people's war adopted by the Viet Cong in Vietnam during the liberation war into a tool, into an accusation in order to frame the entire civilian population as a shield that protects the militants and the guerilla groups. So basically, the human shield

becomes a tool of counterinsurgency in which entire populations are framed as shields. This is where the 1977 Additional Protocol 1 comes in. The 1977 Additional Protocols are a key moment because in these protocols what happens is that the colonized world, Vietnam, the people subjected to imperial domination, managed to inscribe within the international law the right to use armed force and adopt methods of armed struggle in order to liberate themselves against colonial and Imperial domination. So there is a new element. Guerrillas and non-state actors are legitimized within international humanitarian law.

And through the political pressure that they manage to exert in the debates leading to the 1977 protocols, they also manage to guarantee some protections while their soldiers fight from civilian areas. So for instance, a man with a weapon or even carrying weapons, according to the additional protocols, cannot be targeted just because it is moving among the civilian population. A man or an individual can be targeted only if population. A man or an individual can be targeted only if it is acting with a weapon in order to aggress an enemy. Now, the US, the UK, former imperial powers reject some of the key components of the additional protocols until the end of the century. Why? Because their idea was, okay, these additional protocols are a tool that the anti-colonial movements are mobilizing in order to wage forms of warfare in which they hide behind the population like a fish in the water, to use the Maoist metaphor. By the time the Vietnam War ended, the human shielding conversation had been transformed.

A hundred years earlier, it had been about protecting soldiers fighting in the American Civil War. After the Second World War, the idea expanded to include civilians, but in Vietnam the accusation of human shielding became a tool of counterinsurgency, making entire populations vulnerable to attack. You can hear the Israeli attack going on. It's been coming right over the top of us. It's been coming right over the top of us. We are in the phase of the mopping up operation that will be continued until we clean this area. There's only one way to deal with the PLO, which is to eradicate them by force.

I don't think any deal with the PLO is possible. This debate remains alive about hiding, about hiding behind populations. It continues in the 1980s with the war on Lebanon and with Israel accusing the PLO of hiding behind the Lebanese population and trying to justify some of the massacres carried out in Lebanon in 1982 through the idea that the PLO was shielding behind civilians, therefore the Israeli army didn't have any responsibility. And the conversation re-explodes when? After the war on terror, after the beginning of the war on terror, after 2001. The United States and other countries occupy first Afghanistan and then Iraq. They wage forms of counterinsurgency in which they operate at distance,

targeting often crowded civilian areas, new doctrines emerge, like the doctrine of lawfare, according to which non-state actors try to hide behind the protection of international humanitarian law to achieve military objectives, including by manipulating the human shielding clause and trying to hide behind civilians so that the attackers, so Western powers, attack them and cause high civilian casualties and therefore can be blamed. And so that's when the human shielding trope re-emerges with force in order to frame almost entire populations as human shields. One of

the epicenters of this discourse has been the Gaza Strip, at least since 2008 and 2009 since the first war on Gaza in the new millennium. Perugini says this shift is where international humanitarian law, quote, faces the risk of enabling the erosion of the category of civilian and being manipulated to justify large-scale destruction." In casting entire populations as human shields, who decides how many dead civilians is proportionate?

Is this because the law remains unclear or it's loose enough that it's able to be manipulated in this way, or is it just, again, an issue of power who is able to dominate the conversation? I think that both components are relevant. The law in itself is unclear, it has loopholes and it allows for the targeting of areas in which human shielding takes place. On the other hand, historically the history of human shields shows that, especially starting from the 20th century, the majority of the accusations of human shielding have been waged precisely by state actors against non-state irregulars or what are framed as non-state irregulars. So that relationships, those relationships of power between state and non-state actors remain and are constantly reemerging until our presence. So I think that it's a combination of two elements.

The fact that the law doesn't exist without interpretation, and the fact that in the interpretation of the law, the discourse of dominant actors and powerful actors is usually given the precedence when there is a conversation, a legal debate or an ethical debate about the respect of the laws of war, which allow for the reproduction of the problem, as you have described it. There is power and there is also race. There are no conversations about Russia accusing the Ukrainians of human shielding. When Russia targets hospitals in Ukraine using the justification of medical shielding or hospital shielding so that the hospitals were used by the Ukrainian resistance as as a shield, nobody believes them.

The news are not amplified, the discourse is not amplified. Whereas in instances like the war on terror, in instances like Afghanistan, in instances like Iraq, in instances like Gaza, if the state actor accuses the other actor of human shielding, those accusations are immediately amplified. And I believe that that has to do with the fact that in the world on terror, in the context of Palestine, the victims, the populations which are attacked often indiscriminately are brown populations. What do you think are the pivotal moments

or the pivotal conflicts within which this conversation about human shielding and protection of civilians, what conflicts are those that have sort of moved the conversation forward or made it muddier than what it was previously? You've mentioned that it's really started with the American Civil War and then moved through time in different ways. Can you sketch that out for us a little bit?

LR. Well, after the American Civil War, the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 was certainly another pivotal moment in which a state army, the German army, used on a mass scale French dignitaries and notables as human shields in response to tactics of guerrilla used by France against the Germans, so the famous figure of the franc-tireur, the shooter from behind the population. That was certainly one of the key moments of conversation among Western international jurists about the question of protection of populations or hostages and prisoners used as human shields. Another key moment in the conversations about human shielding was certainly World War I, in which during the, again, the German occupation of Belgium, the first reports published by the UK government, the British government, started to

mention the question of human shielding as one of the most atrocious crimes perpetrated by Germany in Belgium and Germany more in general during World War Two. There were other instances in which we find international conversations about the question of human shielding, for instance, the fascist occupation of Ethiopia in 1935, in which for the first time the issue of shielding is debated in relation to a colonial war because of the fact that Ethiopia was a member of the League of Nations. So the Italian fascist regime would accuse the Ethiopians of shielding and hiding behind the Red Cross ambulance or

ambulances or tents in an accusation which is very similar to some of the accusations that we are hearing, we have been hearing in the past two decades in different contexts from Syria to again Ukraine or Palestine in relation to the use of medical facilities as human shields. Then certainly again the decolonization era is another key moment in which the question of shielding becomes prominent, because entire populations are framed as shields of irregular, anti-colonial armies. The debate then re-emerges with strength, with full strength after the war on terror,

and in relation also to Israel's occupation of the occupied Palestinian territories in which there is a conversation both about involuntary human shielding and the use or the accusations against the Palestinian guerrilla groups of using the civilian population as involuntary human shields, but also international activists getting involved in these conflicts, trying to stop the conflicts by putting their bodies

on the front line as a weapon of peace rather than as a weapon of war. I'm Sarah Trelevin, and for over a year, I've been working on one of the most complex stories I've ever covered. There was somebody out there who was faking pregnancies. I started like warning everybody. Every doula that I know. It was fake.

No pregnancy. And the deeper I dig, the more questions I unearth. How long has she been doing this? What does she have to gain from this? From CBC and the BBC World Service, The Con, Caitlin's baby. It's a long story. Settle in. Available now.

Ideas is a podcast and a broadcast. Heard on CBC Radio 1 in Canada. On US Public Radio, across North America, on Sirius XM, in Australia, on ABC Radio National, and around the world at cbc.ca slash ideas. Find us on the CBC News app and wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nala Eyed.

Wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nala Eyed. Operation Banner saw the British military deployed to Northern Ireland for nearly four decades starting in 1969. The images of armed soldiers walking among school children became a staple in newspapers and on the evening news. You run like hell to the nearest wall, cover, whatever, just run like hell. And zigzag, so if there is anybody out there, the chances are they're not going to hit you because you're running around like a headless chicken.

You never stood still for more than 30 seconds at any one time because you'd make yourself a target. You were constantly moving. If you stopped to stand next to kids, and that sounds callous and cruel, but there were cowards and they wouldn't shoot at you because they didn't want to risk shooting any children because that wouldn't have looked good.

Further away from the cameras, Catholics in border villages often accuse the British Army of using entire neighborhoods as human shields against IRA attacks. A newspaper account from 1992. On the road heading north from Londonderry, Kathleen Rutherford braces for an IRA attack on the expanding army base next door. She moved into the house five years ago when the army presence was little more than a tower and gate that monitored passing cars. As she says, now look at it, it's a monstrosity on my

doorstep. She gestures out her back window at the anti-bomb trenches, barbed wire, searchlights and watchtowers that have sprouted up in the past few months. Army engineers and an extra battalion of troops have overhauled the string of barbed wire, searchlights and watchtowers that have sprouted up in the past few months. Army engineers and an extra battalion of troops have overhauled the string of checkpoints into full-blown patrol bases seizing farmland in the process. The Irish News, Belfast's main nationalist newspaper, argued in an editorial that nearby residents in effect have been, quote, deployed in order to defend an army base as a human shield. A senior British official who visited the Rutherford home last month came away apparently unmoved.

After hearing the woman's complaints, Security Minister Michael Mates responded with a line borrowed from signs the army posts at checkpoints. Don't blame us, blame the terrorists. The law doesn't allow to transform an entire civilian population into a target. So again, I think we have to contextualize historically where that kind of operation, according to which the entire civilian population, the Maoists rather than other groups, are transformed

into a military target. And that's precisely in context of foreign occupation and foreign domination of a colonial or imperial nature. That's precisely the kind of inescapable nature of certain forms of counterinsurgency carried out in a context in which the target, the ultimate target of the occupation is the group as a group. So just to give you an example, the literature and the main conversations taking place precisely during the Vietnam era and the decolonization wars is precisely this, that counterinsurgency carried out in a context

in which an entire population is dominated as a population end up by completely destroying the foundations of international humanitarian law and transforming counterinsurgency into something that can have a genocidal tendency, a tendency to involve the group as a group and target the group as a group in war. And I think that those conversations are reemerging now in relation to a specific theater of war, which is under the scrutiny of the International Court of Justice, for instance, which is the situation of Palestine, in which one of the accusations against the Israeli military is precisely this, that a counterinsurgency operation has turned into a war against the people as a

people. And that's why that specific situation is under scrutiny at the ICJ. If I think of national liberation wars or situations in which people are trying to liberate themselves from forms of foreign domination, I don't think that there is a possibility to solve the contradiction between on the one hand, methods of warfare in which entire populations participate, also ideologically, in order to liberate themselves to the war effort, and on the other hand, attacking and occupying armies which are mobilizing and instrumentalizing the international humanitarian law in order to achieve military objectives.

I don't think that there is a possibility to fully reconcile the register of justice of populations which are dominated as populations, as groups, and which are trying to liberate themselves as groups, and on the other hand, foreign forces or occupations which ultimately target peoples as peoples, populations as populations. There is a tension there that is unresolvable. I can use a different example to probably try to think about solutions to solve this tension. And the other example is the example of hospitals and medical facilities. The U.S. is having trouble explaining how and why it bombed a charity hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan on Saturday. At first, military leaders said U.S. troops near the Doctors Without Borders Trauma Center

were under attack from the Taliban and called on a gunship for help. Twenty-two people were killed, including 12 hospital workers and three children. What happened within the history of codification of international humanitarian law is that hospitals became protected within the process of institutionalization of international humanitarian law. In this regime of protection, there are certain exceptions according to which hospitals, after taking the necessary precautions, can be targeted. And what are those exceptional circumstances? Precisely circumstances in which an enemy is accused of using the medical facility as a shield for military operation. Now, that clause of international humanitarian law was completely inherited from the human

shielding clauses and from the human shielding normative framework and applied to physical medical structures. This accusation is used often in different conflicts in which people fight according to different ideological framework in order to justify more and more the epidemics of bombardment of hospitals that we have been witnessing, especially in the last two decades,

from the Syrian regime with the help of Russia and Iran to the two main chapters of the war on terror, Iraq and Afghanistan, two other contexts of war. Now, in relation to this clause, something can be done. The gap can be closed. How? By introducing a total ban on the bombardment of hospitals, like the total ban and the total prohibition on torture. Why a total ban? Because it's very simple. Hospitals are not like any other structures. Hospitals are precisely the key infrastructures

sustaining the life of a people and the life of a population. And there cannot be any exceptions when hospitals should be protected. So on the one hand, with a total ban, the prohibition of using the hospitals as a shield would remain in place. So that kind of prohibition would remain. But on the other hand, we would close the gap of an international legal framework that allows for an exception that is producing lethal effects on entire populations.

I'm Dr. Mimi Syed. I'm a board certified emergency medicine physician and I work out of Washington state. I recently had two medical missions in Gaza. Yeah, I mean, it's very apocalyptic when you enter Gaza. You know, it seems surreal. It's almost like stepping into another dimension. You come in from a normally relatively normal civilization

when you cross into Karim Shalom. And then you get into Gaza, and you get to the checkpoint, and it is munitions everywhere very close to you. And then when you get into the part of Gaza, it's just complete, you know, rubble. You can see around you there's no structures that are still there. And the roads are completely destroyed. So the, you know, convoy that you do get into is basically driving around rubble and trying to find a safe path to get through. It's about six o'clock in the morning and that's what we're waking up to.

And then in the hospital itself, you know, it's overcrowded because people are using the hospital for shelter and for safety. Anytime there's a sad foreigner around, so all of the physicians that are foreign work in the hospital, that gives you a certain amount of immunity from the perspective of the locals. And so they try to congregate around that area for safety. Hold on. Hold on. Yeah, yeah. Did you get ultrasound? Grab ultrasound. No, no, no. Wait, wait, wait.

Hey, shwaya, shwaya. Hey, hey, hey, hey, brother, brother. Hey, wait, wait, wait, wait. Most of our patients were children. So, over 70% are women and children. All of our patients were civilians. So, we saw those who were in the hospital, they were all women and children.

And we saw that there were a lot of women who were in the hospital. 70% are women and children. All of our patients were civilians. So we saw those type of injuries. We saw severe burn wounds in children again. And then the more unusual pattern of injury that we would see are children with single shots, gunshots. And that would happen every single day, multiple times a day when I was there in August at Nasr hospital. I saw, you know, at least 18 documented cases that I had of children coming in with gunshot wounds to the head or the chest. And when we would ask the parents or the families, where did, you know, how did this happen? Where were you? And they would always say that it was families, where did, you know, how did this happen, where were you?

And they would always say that it was a quadcopter, which I understand is a drone that has shooting capability, or a sniper. December 13th, we started December 12th, but overnight we had a mass casualty incident, approximately 60 patients from Nusra'a at the airstrike. It's very chaotic.

We had many children and women with shrapnel injuries, open head injuries with brain matter exposed. Very chaotic. Things are very unorganized and unfortunately that is the nature of the situation but we have not eaten dinner or lunch or had any breaks but we are headed back now into our rooms hopefully it'll be a nice quiet night but I'm not hopeful December 22nd 2024 I'm in the pediatric December 22nd, 2024, I'm in the pediatric emergency department again today

and have been seeing some patients with the local doctors and just in about one hour, I saw about a dozen patients with malnutrition, severe malnutrition and underweight. For example, I saw a one-year-old that came in for one week of vomiting and fever but is significantly underweight. So he was about seven kilograms and he's one year old. That's severely malnutritioned. In Gaza, you know, you save a child and the next day or in the next minute the child could die because of another airstrike or be shot again or die of starvation or sepsis. So it's a different world and that's the best way to describe it.

To describe how the accusation of human shielding has expanded to include entire civilian populations, Petrucciani uses the term proximate shielding. In the book we coined this idea of proximate shielding in order precisely to capture and to grasp the transformation of the accusation of human shielding into a tool used in order to outlaw completely any form of resistance and transform entire civilian populations into human shields. I think that the seeds and the elements for that idea of entire populations being transformed into human shields was there since after World War II, but it really exploded with extreme clarity

after the beginning of the war on terror. It exploded precisely when, in the name of national security entire countries were invaded, framing anything that was close to the rebels, to the Islamist movements, to the radical Islam groups as a human shield. So we see it in the war on terror, we see it in instances like Sri Lanka, in the Sri Lankan Civil War, in which, for instance, the government accused the Tamil Tigers of using the entire civilian population as a proximate shield. In Sri Lanka, something extraordinary extraordinary happened in a way because basically the government constituted a commission of investigation in which it hired two foreign legal experts. Those

legal experts were struggling with the idea of applying the human shielding accusation to an entire population, so they had to come up with calculations. So their calculation was that the government had confined the Tamil population in what the government called the Tamil cages, so humanitarian areas in which the civilian population was ordered to shelter. Then the government accused the Tamil rebels of using those humanitarian areas as shields, as shielding area. So 400,000 civilians were displaced in the Tamil cages. And the two legal experts came up with a calculation and they said, okay, if in a normal hostage

situation killing one hostage in order to save nine people is legitimate, then in a shielding situation like the one in Sri Lanka, if there are 400,000 civilians in the Tamil cages, killing up to 40,000 civilians is legitimate in order to free the population. Well, in that instance, precisely 40,000 people were killed by the government. So the proximate shielding accusation was deployed in order to justify the destruction of a significant portion of the Tamil population and the Tamil people.

We had never seen numbers before in the human shielding conversation. So that's also the moment in which we realized that probably that moment was a turning point moment because then what you see is also similar calculations being applied to other contexts and other theaters of war like Iraq during the siege of Mosul in which the US army besieged Mosul and ISIS defended itself from within a civilian area and by proximity thousands of people were framed as collateral damage and killable human shields

by the attackers. And so when you look at a situation like Gaza or the occupied Palestinian territories in general, it seems like that region itself has been one of the key generators of this constant turnaround human shields. That's really kind of the main locus for this conversation, at least in sort of contemporary times, even during the war on terror. How do you understand the occupied Palestinian territories as a kind of ground zero for this conversation about human shielding and proximate shielding? What is happening there that you think informs this conversation? I think that in the occupied Palestinian territories and more precisely I think that in the occupied Palestinian territories and more precisely in Gaza, the human shielding conversation has become predominant for different reasons.

First of all, the fact that the Gaza Strip has been completely isolated from the rest of the world and controlled mainly from the air, through violence from the air, since 2007, when the entire strip was defined by the Israeli military as an enemy entity. entity. Gaza has specific natural and military conditions. It's a besieged area, it's flat, there are no mountains, there are no places where hiding can take place, it's overcrowded, it was 2.3 million people before the beginning of the October 2023 war. And in this context, there are no clear spaces in the battlefield which can be used to defend yourself unless you embedded yourself very deeply with the civilian population. So on the one hand you have the power from the air and the control from the air, the military bombardment, the sequence of wars that we have been witnessing since 2008-2009,

accompanied by a total siege, a total closure of the area. And on the other hand, you have groups which are trying to exert their right to self-defense from an area which is completely flat, overcrowded, and where there are no other tools of waging a self-defensive war other than from within these areas. So I think that this is a context in which civilian casualties are high, and since civilian casualties are very high given the nature of the battlefield, human shielding becomes the justification for the attackers. It becomes the main legal argument that can be deployed when 2,000, 1,000, 3,000 civilians are killed in every round of war, and it becomes the justification for excellence when the entire population is targeted as a people

for over a year and a half. So I think that that's the specific nature of the situation and the context which makes the accusation of human shielding the key to use by the occupying army. How are you seeing what's happening in Gaza echo in other places? I don't think there is an echo in other places because this is the beginning of the abyss. It's the beginning of the abyss because what is being done in Gaza is the mobilization of the human shielding accusation in order to justify a war without limits, a war without restraints, a war without constraints. And that's why we are in a situation in which the human shielding accusation is

also debated within the International Court of Justice in a case that has to do with genocide. It's one of the first instances in which a people as a people is targeted through this accusation and I think that it's a watershed moment. We have to choose watershed moment. We have to choose between the two. What's going on in Gaza could shape the practices of war and the conducts of war in the next decades if we accept the human shielding accusation and if we accept the idea that by mobilizing the human shielding accusation, one can target an entire population. One can transform, one can say and argue that schools are not schools, mosques are not mosques, hospitals are not hospitals, cemeteries are not cemeteries,

homes are not homes. Here, the human shielding accusation is being used to shape a world without civilians. The very category of civilian is abolished when an entire population, an entire group, is targeted as a group. You've been listening to an episode about the history of human shielding. Audio from Gaza, courtesy of Dr. Mimi Sayed. This episode was produced by Naheed Mustafa. Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso. Technical production, Danielle Duval and Marco Luciano. The senior producer is Nikola Lukcic.

Greg Kelly is the executive producer of Ideas, and I'm Nala Ayed. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.