You mean the best. Hamas have an explicit policy of using human shields. It's damn impressive to get so low number of casualties in such an environment.
It's more accurate to say that Hamas are members of the population that is being ethnically cleansed.
Saying Hamas uses human shields is like saying that the IDF uses human shields because they embed themselves into the civilian populations of Israel and of Washington, DC.
Look, I detest Hamas but it’s really hard to look at entire cities’ worth of dead Palestinian civilians and a forced population movement of millions of people and say that “investigated by the IDF” is doing much. This is a long, brutal war and neither side is covering themselves in glory.
I’ve supported Israel’s right to secure itself for decades but this campaign has made me question the moral aspects more than anything else because they’ve been more willing to take the kind of collateral damage Hamas does, not be better, and that seems self-destructive for both the international consequences and the near-certainty that many young Palestinians, who until 2023 did not like Hamas much, have fresh grievances to fuel a desire for revenge.
The only grievance they ever needed was their anger that Islam does not cover the entire Earth. Or their grievance that Hindus or Jews exist.
But yea, I agree that Israel can't win this one. The west are squeamish about civilians and Hamas forces civilians to die. And Israel is placed inside what is a genocidal anti-semitic part of the world. It's just a bad place to place the state. Kinda like trying to start a Jewish state inside 1933 Germany. Even with a strong army, it's a very bad idea.
"The use of civilians as human shields is not novel.8 Evidence of the
practice dates back to the American Civil War9 and the Second World War.10
The practice has also been documented in the Korean Conflict and the Vietnam
War. 11 United Nations (U.N.) peacekeeping forces similarly faced attacks from
weapon systems placed within civilian areas or hostile forces that used civilians
as human shields, for example, in Beirut in the early 1980s and Somalia in the
early 1990s.12 The human shields tactic was also employed by Saddam
Hussein’s Iraq in many of its conflicts.13"
Saying Hamas uses human shields is like saying that the IDF uses human shields because they embed themselves into the civilian populations of Israel and of Washington, DC.