IBT Sources Hate Site to Accuse Israel of Using Palestinian Child as a Human Shield

UPDATE:

The IDF have confirmed that the boy was one of around 50 Palestinians who had been rioting, throwing stones and burned tires at forces, and was released shortly after he was caught.

In an exclusive statement to HonestReporting, an IDF official said:

An Arabic-speaking soldier spoke to the boy and brought him candy in an effort to calm him down. It had been more challenging for forces to release him as rioters continued to throw rocks in their direction, presenting a clear danger to the boy and to the forces’ safety.

The International Business Times falsely accuses the IDF of using a Palestinian child as a human shield.

In the bizarre headline, the IBT can apparently tell, despite the soldiers’ covered faces, that they are “Tel Aviv Troops.” More likely, this is yet another case where the media refuse to acknowledge that Jerusalem is Israel’s capital, preferring to portray Tel Aviv as synonymous with Israel.

The IBT claims that those balaclava-clad Tel Avivians are “allegedly using West Bank children as human shields.” Who alleged this?

According to the IBT’s Mary Pascaline, it is an Israeli human rights organization that made the human shield claim. But the B’tselem post she links to makes no reference to the term “human shield.” The post does however, provide a video and a seven year old Palestinian boy’s account of an incident that occurred at a demonstration, where Palestinians throw rocks at Israeli troops who try to disperse them. This is the child’s testimony:

The video does seem to confirm the boy’s account, which itself does not describe a human shield situation. But the video also shows some details that he left out: protesters were throwing stones towards the soldiers and the boy, and some soldiers then stood in front of the boy, essentially shielding him. If there were any human shields in this incident, it was the Israeli soldiers.

So if B’tselem never accused the soldiers of using the boy as human shield, then who did? Where did Pascaline get this idea from?

MEMO

The answer is another link in the article: to the Hamas-supporting website that regularly promotes anti-Semitic tropes, Middle East Monitor (MEMO). There is enough about MEMO to prove its agenda and unreliability, and the article that Pascaline links to sheds no new light on the incident at the protest, with no more information than is readily available in the B’tselem post.

So why has Pascaline relied on a propaganda site to put a false spin on the story? Is it because the B’tselem post itself was not enough to demonize Israeli soldiers, that she had to find another interpretation of the incident?

Pascaline quotes from a UN report from 2013 that accuses Israel of torturing Palestinian children, using them as human shields, and killing children in Gaza with

air and naval strikes on densely populated areas with a significant presence of children, thus disregarding the principles of proportionality and distinction.

The article however gives no context on who or what Israel was targeting in Gaza, or how Palestinian children in the West Bank might be caught up in violence – for example in one protest, a Palestinian father was filmed using his son to provoke Israeli border police by pushing his son towards them and calling on them to kill his child. Instead, one of them reached out and shook the boy’s hand – so the father then got him to throw rocks at them.

The article also makes no mention of how Palestinian civilians in Gaza, including children, are used as human shields by Hamas when they attack Israel, by hiding and using weapons, and building attack tunnels in civilian areas – often with the civilians too afraid to protest against Hamas’s actions.

So the IBT has produced a one-sided article that demonizes Israeli soldiers, while ignoring every possible piece of background or context that doesn’t fit with Pascaline’s false narrative, but that might actually give its readers a more rounded and balanced perspective. A perspective that evidently, the IBT and Pascaline just don’t want their readers to know.

Please let the IBT know your concerns about the unprofessional and biased journalism on display – [email protected]

Featured image IDF [CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons]