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A baby in the rubble makes the front page.
The men who put him there get a free pass.
For decades, Hamas has perfected one tactic that wins every propaganda war it fights. They hide behind the very people they claim to defend. They put rocket launchers beside classrooms. They store weapons in hospitals. They turn neighborhoods into launch pads and then parade the casualties as proof of their own victimhood. And international law makes no room for it.
This is not an allegation. It is a war crime spelled out in black and white under international law. And the proof comes not only from the battlefield but from the mouths of Hamas leaders themselves.
The Law Hamas Breaks Every Day
International humanitarian law is clear.
Article 28 of the Fourth Geneva Convention:
“The presence of a protected person may not be used to render certain points or areas immune from military operations.”
Fourth Geneva Convention, Article 28
You cannot hide your military targets among civilians and expect immunity from attack.
Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions goes further in Article 51(7):
“The presence or movements of the civilian population or individual civilians shall not be used to render certain points or areas immune from military operations.”
Protocol I, Article 51(7)
These protections exist to keep noncombatants out of the line of fire. They are not loopholes to be exploited by armed groups looking for propaganda victories. This is the law that should put Hamas leaders in The Hague tomorrow.
Hamas does not break these rules by accident. It uses them as a battle plan. This is documented by the United Nations, by aid organizations, by journalists on the ground, and by Hamas’s own leaders.
Hamas Brags About Its War Crime
In 2008, Hamas parliamentarian Fathi Hammad said it openly during a televised speech:
“For the Palestinian people, death has become an industry… The elderly excel at this, and so do the children. This is why they have formed human shields.”
Fathi Hammad, 2008
He was not speaking in metaphor.
Hamas propaganda videos have shown fighters launching rockets from the rooftops of civilian apartment buildings. During the 2014 Gaza conflict, an Al Jazeera broadcast accidentally caught a rocket being assembled and fired from the courtyard of a UN school.
Caught on Camera
The Israel Defense Forces have documented dozens of cases where rocket launchers were placed within 50 meters of schools, hospitals, and mosques.
In 2021, during Operation Guardian of the Walls, IDF drone footage showed a launch site inside a children’s playground.
Even reporters sympathetic to the Palestinian cause have witnessed it. The Washington Post in 2014 described Hamas fighters operating from inside Shifa Hospital, Gaza’s largest medical facility. Weapons are stored there. Commanders meeting in its corridors. Ambulances are used to move personnel and weapons. And a 2014 Wall Street Journal dispatch noted that rocket fire was launched from just outside a journalist’s hotel; the crew could hear the launch and feel the blast, confirming that Hamas embedded its operations in civilian zones.
The Smoking Gun from the UN and NGOs
The United Nations Relief and Works Agency admitted in 2014 that rockets were hidden in three of its schools during the conflict. The agency “strongly condemned” the act but handed the rockets over to “local authorities”, in Gaza, which means Hamas.
Human Rights Watch in 2007 acknowledged that Palestinian armed groups endangered civilians by operating from residential areas and storing munitions in civilian buildings. Amnesty International has also recorded these incidents, even while bending over backward to balance the criticism of Hamas with attacks on Israel.
You will not see these facts on CNN. And they are counting on that silence.
How Hamas Manufactures Civilian Deaths
The death of civilians in war is always tragic. But there is a difference between a civilian caught in crossfire and a civilian deliberately placed in danger to protect combatants.
Hamas does not simply use human shields in a moment of desperation. They build the battlefield around civilians so that when a strike comes, the cameras will capture exactly what Hamas wants.
In 2014, Israel gave advance warnings before strikes, phone calls, leaflets, and “roof knock” shots. Hamas told residents to stay put. Fighters even blocked evacuations. The goal was not to save lives.
The goal was to create headlines.
The Death Cycle Hamas Depends On
The cycle is predictable. Hamas hides behind civilians. Israel strikes to take out military targets. Images of the dead and wounded flood the media, stripped of context. Western headlines read “Israeli Strike Kills Civilians” without noting the launch site was on a hospital roof or inside a schoolyard.
Some of the footage is staged. Some is recycled from other wars. The “Pallywood” industry, exposed since the early 2000s, stages injury scenes for sympathetic media. In one 2013 incident, footage aired by several outlets showed a “wounded” man being carried on a stretcher only for him to be filmed moments later walking around unharmed, adjusting his clothes. But even without staging, the battlefield Hamas creates ensures the pictures will come.
Call the Crime by Its Name
This is not about whether you support Israel or Palestine. This is about calling a documented war crime what it is. Using civilians, especially children, as shields for fighters is a violation of the Geneva Conventions. It is illegal. It is immoral. It is indefensible.
Yet much of the international community acts as if this is complicated. They mourn the “humanitarian situation” but refuse to say the words “human shields.” They condemn the response while ignoring the cause.
If the West cannot name the crime it will never stop. And if it never stops more civilians will die, not because of the strikes but because of the men who hide behind them.
Hamas calls it “resistance.” International law calls it a war crime. UNRWA admits rockets in its Gaza schools.
Ban Ki-moon condemned it. Human Rights Watch documented it. Amnesty International recorded it.
Journalists saw it in Shifa Hospital. IDF drones filmed it in playgrounds. Hamas leaders bragged about it.
And the world still looks away.
The longer we look away, the more children Hamas will bury for the cameras.