Jerusalem – An Israeli military tactic of using Palestinian civilians to approach suspected militants during arrest raids in the West Bank is illegal, the Supreme Court ruled Thursday.
A coalition of human-rights groups challenged the so-called “early warning” procedure, under which Palestinian residents were summoned either to knock on a suspect’s door and urge him to surrender or to clear bystanders from a targeted house before soldiers moved in.
Critics charged that Israeli soldiers were in effect using the Palestinian civilians as human shields, but the army said its aim was to prevent bloodshed on both sides during arrest operations.
That practice was, under the military’s rules, to be used only when the resident agreed and was deemed by the on-site military commander to be safe from possible harm.
But Chief Justice Aharon Barak wrote that the tactic is illegal because “it is practically difficult to estimate when (a civilian’s) consent was freely given and when the result of obvious or concealed pressures.”
Barak wrote that international law forbids an occupying power from using civilians to carry out military operations.
An attorney representing the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, the human-rights group Adalah and five other petitioners expressed satisfaction.
But the attorney, Marwan Dalal, said activists would watch to see that the ruling was obeyed.
Dalal said the army had repeatedly violated a high-court injunction issued in August 2002 on using human shields. He said the rights groups had filed testimony from 33 people detailing alleged violations.
One of those was an incident last year in which Israeli border police allegedly strapped a 13- year-old Palestinian boy onto the hood of their jeep for two hours to deter protesters from throwing rocks at them during a demonstration against Israel’s separation barrier in the West Bank. A photograph at the time showed the boy tied to the protective mesh of the vehicle’s windshield.
