The Dangerous Failure to Hold Hamas Accountable for Using Human Shields

During its war with Israel in Gaza, Hamas has used human shields—a war crime under international law—not only incessantly but also systematically and strategically, as a core part of its planning and goals. Hamas has committed this war crime by systematically embedding its fighters, command infrastructure, and weapons within civilian areas, including in a 300-mile military tunnel network under and into civilian buildings; by persistently firing from civilian buildings; by systematically using hospitals to conceal and support military operations; and by intentionally exposing Gaza’s civilians to danger by discouraging and preventing their evacuation from battle zones.

Despite these incessant, systematic, and strategic violations, Hamas’ commission of the war crime of using human shields has been entirely disregarded by the hundreds of pages of Gaza war resolutions, reports, and judicial opinions of the United Nations, the International Criminal Court (ICC), and the International Court of Justice (ICJ). While persistently ignoring Hamas’ prolific use of human shields, these international institutions have regularly blamed Israel for casualties foreseeably resulting from those Hamas violations.

These institutions’ disregard of this Hamas war crime strategy has undermined both their overall institutional credibility and the accuracy of their legal and factual assessments of civilian harm during the Gaza conflict. It has also created powerful incentives for terrorist groups and authoritarian militaries to expand their use of human shields in future conflicts.

The consequences extend far beyond Israel. When international institutions disregard the strategic, systematic use of civilians to unlawfully shield military objectives, they both undermine the integrity of the law of armed conflict and reward a strategy that predictably increases civilian deaths. Unless those incentives are reversed, human shielding will become an even more central and incessant strategy against Western militaries. Reversing those incentives should be a top priority for the United States and NATO allies.

Human Shields and the Law of Armed Conflict

The law of armed conflict clearly prohibits the use of human shields by both state and non-state actors. Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions, in its Article 51(7)—which reflects customary international law—provides that “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, in particular in attempts to shield military objectives from attacks or to shield, favour or impede military operations.”

The U.S. Department of Defense Law of War Manual adds that “[t]he party that employs human shields in an attempt to shield military objectives from attack assumes responsibility for their injury, although the attacker may share this responsibility if it fails to take feasible precautions.” Thus, under the U.S. Department of Defense interpretation of the human shields prohibition, Hamas and not the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) assumes responsibility for casualties among Gaza civilians used by Hamas as human shields. Under this interpretation, when the IDF directs attacks against Hamas military objectives that Hamas has shielded with civilians, the IDF potentially shares responsibility for resulting casualties among those civilians only if the IDF fails to take feasible precautions to minimize civilian harm.

Although the International Committee of the Red Cross and some scholars dispute whether the attacker’s responsibility is reduced, there is no legal basis for ignoring the defender’s use of human shields. In addition, the statute of the ICC, which asserts jurisdiction (albeit controversially) over the Gaza conflict, specifies that “the court shall have jurisdiction in respect of war crimes in particular when committed as part of a plan or policy or as part of a large-scale commission of such crimes.” In other words, while the law of armed conflict prohibits every single use of human shields, ICC jurisdiction comes particularly into play when human shields are used as part of a plan or policy or on a large-scale basis. Hamas’ human shields strategy exemplifies such planned, large-scale use of human shields.

Hamas’ Human Shields Strategy

Hamas has made human shields use the cornerstone of its Gaza military strategy. When Hamas attacked on Oct. 7, 2023, it understood that it could not defeat Israel using conventional military tactics. Instead, its strategy sought to impose political, diplomatic, and other costs on Israel.

To achieve this, Hamas “transformed the entirety of the Gaza Strip,” including civilian buildings, “for the purpose of creating Gaza civilian casualties that will be blamed on” Israel, as seven retired senior U.S. military officers concluded in a detailed analysis. Hamas did so by systematically embedding its fighters, command infrastructure, and weapons within civilian areas, including in a 300-mile military tunnel network under and into civilian buildings; by persistently firing from civilian buildings; by systematically using hospitals to conceal and support military operations; and by intentionally exposing Gaza’s civilians to danger by discouraging and preventing their evacuation from battle zones. By doing so, Hamas dramatically—and intentionally—increased the number of Gaza civilian casualties that would result from any lawful Israeli military action to rescue the hostages or prevent Hamas from fulfilling its vow to repeat the Oct. 7 atrocities.

Those casualties, in turn, enabled Hamas to accuse Israel of war crimes and advance an information warfare strategy designed to delegitimize Israel internationally. In other words, Hamas systematically committed the actual war crime of using human shields in order to create a situation in which the IDF could more readily be falsely accused of committing war crimes such as the deliberate killing of civilians.

Statements by Hamas’ leadership reflect this logic. Yahya Sinwar, who led Hamas during the war’s first year, repeatedly suggested that Palestinian civilian deaths served Hamas’ interests. More specifically, Sinwar said high Palestinian civilian casualties in Gaza would put pressure on Israel, and called such casualties “necessary sacrifices.”

Sinwar also previously declared that Hamas’ March of Return campaign, which encouraged Gazans (including women and children) to riot at the border with Israel, was designed to generate civilian casualties, stating, “When we decided to embark on these marches, we decided to turn that which is most dear to us—the bodies of our women and children—into a dam … to prevent the racing of many Arabs towards the normalization of ties with [Israel].”

Sinwar boasted that the plan worked, as “our people have imposed their agenda upon the whole world,” forcing onto “the world’s television screens … the sacrifice of their [Palestinian] children as an offering for Jerusalem and the Right of Return.” “We make the headlines only with blood. No blood, no news,” said Sinwar. In other words, Hamas did not merely foresee Gaza civilian harm; it sought to produce it.

How Hamas Implements Its Human Shields Strategy

Hamas operationalizes its human shields strategy through several methods. Perhaps most significantly, it constructed a tunnel network—more than 300 miles long—which a senior Hamas official specified was only for sheltering Hamas members and equipment. The Hamas-only tunnel network frequently runs under (and sometimes opens into) civilian houses, schools, hospitals, mosques, UN facilities, and other civilian buildings. Meanwhile, Hamas has built no bomb shelters at all that are open to Gaza civilians.

Hamas also stores weapons in, and fires at Israeli forces from, scores of residential buildings. The law of armed conflict provides that residential buildings are protected against attack, unless and for such time as they are being used for military purposes.

Israel therefore has the legal right to attack residential buildings that Hamas is using to house weapons, fighters, military tunnels, or sniper’s nests. Aware of this fundamental principle of the law of armed conflict, Hamas nevertheless uses homes, and the civilians within them, as human shields.

By using human shields, Hamas puts Israeli forces in a lose-lose situation. If the IDF fires back at the Hamas sniper’s nest in a home, it will sustain information warfare costs from the resultant civilian casualties and damaged home. Alternatively, if the IDF refrains from taking action, for fear of such costs, it both risks its own soldiers’ lives and hands Hamas a military advantage, thereby prolonging the war.

Hamas has also fired hundreds of rockets at Israel from launchers hidden in densely populated civilian areas of Gaza. A NATO report described Hamas’ practice, since 2007, of “[f]iring rockets, artillery, and mortars from or in proximity to heavily populated civilian areas, often from or near facilities which should be protected according to the Geneva Conventions (e.g. schools, hospitals, or mosques).”

The NATO report said that for Hamas “the strategic logic of human shields [is] based on an awareness of Israel’s desire to minimise collateral damage, and of Western public opinion’s sensitivity towards civilian casualties.” The report explained that by using human shields “Hamas employs a win-win scenario: if indeed the IDF [attacks the shielded Hamas forces], and the number of civilian casualties surges, Hamas can ... accuse the IDF (and Israel) of committing war crimes[.]”

The NATO report said that Hamas’ ability to leverage human shields to accuse Israel of causing civilian casualties “serves Hamas in the diplomatic theatre, as any collateral damage caused by the IDF usually yields harsh criticism from the UN[.]” In order to advance this objective, Hamas deliberately avoids “fighting from open spaces,” instead ensuring that “populated areas are the main battlefield.” “Hamas records ... the IDF’s attacks [and] then manipulates the footage (e.g. by hiding its military presence in areas that were then attacked by the IDF, thus causing civilian casualties), and disseminates this manufactured evidence across a wide array of media channels[,]” said the NATO report.

“On the other hand, if the IDF limits its use of military power in Gaza [to avoid harming the human shields], Hamas will be ... able to protect its assets while continuing to fight[,]” said the NATO report. By “allow[ing] Hamas to operate relatively freely,” the organization’s use of Gaza civilians as human shields enables it to continue attacking Israeli civilians with rockets, mortar shells, and other cross-border attacks.

Hospitals occupy a particularly prominent place in Hamas’ strategy. While the law of armed conflict specifically protects hospitals, that protection ceases when hospitals are used, outside their humanitarian function, for military purposes.

A U.S. intelligence assessment released in January 2024 concluded that Hamas used al-Shifa Hospital and sites beneath it for command infrastructure, weapons storage, and detention of Israeli hostages. Both Israeli and Biden administration officials reported similar Hamas uses of other Gaza hospitals.

When Hamas used these hospitals to conceal and support military operations, it violated the prohibition on using human shields, because it intentionally used the presence of civilians to shield military objectives from attack. Nevertheless, when Israeli forces raided al-Shifa Hospital, in order to release hostages and capture the command infrastructure and stored weapons, the United Nations intensely criticized Israel’s action, describing it as “prohibited by international law.” The UN’s statement criticizing Israel’s raid made no mention of Hamas having used the hospital for military purposes. The UN statement also made no mention of the law of armed conflict provisions that prohibit using human shields, prohibit using hospitals for military purposes, and withdraw protections from hospitals used for military purposes.

Hamas also repeatedly intentionally exposed Gaza’s civilians to danger by urging them to disregard Israel’s requests to evacuate battle zones, and by using roadblocks to prevent such evacuations. As Professor Michael Schmitt has explained, Hamas “actively discouraging civilians from evacuating[,]” and “preventing them from leaving ... qualif[ied] as using human shields.” Indeed, according to Schmitt, previously a senior West Point expert on the law of war, Hamas was legally obligated to instead facilitate the civilians’ departure.

Western Leaders Recognized Hamas’ Strategic Use of Human Shields

The UN, ICC, and ICJ’s disregard of Hamas’ use of human shields contrasts sharply with the repeated condemnations of this Hamas war crime strategy by U.S. and European leaders. President Biden several times criticized Hamas’ use of human shields. Former Secretary of State Antony Blinken stated that Hamas “intentionally embeds itself within the civilian population, in and under apartments, in and under schools, mosques, hospitals.”

European leaders were equally explicit. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said in November 2023 that “Hamas is clearly using innocent Palestinians and hostages as human shields. It is horrific. It is pure evil.” The European Union’s High Representative said, “The EU condemns the use of hospitals and civilians as human shields by Hamas.”

Similar statements came from the prime ministers, foreign ministers, or defense ministers of Australia, Canada, France, Italy, Germany, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom. Germany’s foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock, warned that “we must not be fooled by Hamas’ playbook ... Hamas is playing with human suffering, using women and children in Gaza as human shields ... with obvious intent ... to fan the flames of hatred and violence [and] spark regional escalation.”

Notably, even officials of the Palestinian Authority accused Hamas of using Gaza civilians “as human shields instead of protecting them” and criticized Hamas for “holding more than two million Palestinian residents hostage and using them as human shields.”

The UN, ICC, and ICJ Have Ignored Hamas’ Use of Human Shields

In stark contrast with the extensive evidence—and the explicit condemnations by Western leaders and even the Palestinian Authority—Hamas’ use of human shields has been disregarded by the hundreds of pages of Gaza war resolutions, reports, and judicial opinions of the UN, ICC, and ICJ.

The UN General Assembly resolutions regarding the war pointedly criticized Israel’s conduct in the conflict but contained almost no mention of Hamas, let alone its use of human shields. The first General Assembly resolution in the wake of Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, atrocities against Israeli civilians explicitly criticized Israel’s military response to the atrocities but failed to either mention Hamas by name or specifically condemn the Oct. 7 atrocities (the assembly failed to pass a Canadian amendment that would have done so), let alone condemn Hamas’ use of human shields. In December 2023, the General Assembly again rejected efforts, this time in amendments by the U.S. and Austria, to add condemnations of Hamas to a resolution that demanded Israel cease its military operations in Gaza.

Hamas was not mentioned by name in any post-Oct. 7 UN General Assembly resolution until June 2025, when a resolution expressed “grave concern” at the “escalation of violence since the 7 October 2023 attack” (emphasis added). This resolution again failed to condemn the Hamas atrocities on Oct. 7, 2023, or to mention Hamas’ use of human shields, but excoriated Israel’s military actions following Oct. 7. The June 2025 resolution did however include one reference to Hamas, in a call for the “release of all hostages held by Hamas and other groups”—in contrast, the General Assembly had in passing its December 2023 resolution rejected an amendment to specify that the hostages were held by Hamas.

The pattern is similarly clear in UN reporting. Between Oct. 7, 2023, and May 2025, the UN issued more than 350 Gaza-related reports. Many of these reports were dedicated to criticizing Israel’s conduct in Gaza, with repeated assertions that Israel had engaged in “indiscriminate attacks” and conducted illegal “attacks on hospitals.”

In contrast, a detailed study by Maj. (ret.) Andrew Fox and Salo Aizenberg for the Henry Jackson Society found that the term “human shields” appeared in those reports only four times, in each instance confined to a brief skeptical reference to a “claim” or “allegation” or unverified “report” that Hamas had used human shields. The study found that “[t]he UN has never dedicated a single paragraph, let alone an entire report, to analysing how Hamas has fought the war in Gaza.” As of May, there is still no such UN report.

Only once has a senior UN official expressly admitted Hamas used human shields during the two-year Gaza war. In a Nov. 6. 2023 statement, UN Secretary-General António Guterres noted, without elaboration, that “Hamas and other militants use civilians as human shields.”

In contrast, several UN officials have accused Israel of using human shields during the war. As discussed above, Hamas’ use of human shields is a strategy determined at the highest levels of the organization and implemented systematically by years-long planned undertakings including digging hundreds of miles of tunnels under and into civilian buildings. In contrast, some Israeli soldiers have, according to some UN officials and media outlets, allegedly made tactical use of Palestinian detainees as human shields in Gaza.

The Israeli military has responded to the allegations by asserting that it “prohibits the use of civilians as human shields” and specifically “prohibit[s] the use of detained Gaza civilians for military operations.” Israel’s Supreme Court has also prohibited the use of human shields since at least 2005. Former Biden administration officials interviewed for a Reuters article about alleged human shields use by individual Israeli soldiers in Gaza said that U.S. intelligence indicated that the alleged incidents “did not represent overarching Israeli practice or policy.”

The IDF has said that in “several cases,” it “opened investigations after reasonable suspicion arose regarding the use of Palestinians for military missions during the operations.” In nearly every protracted armed conflict, one or more soldiers inevitably violates the law of armed conflict. Such soldiers must be held accountable for those violations.

The UN, ICC, and ICJ’s silence regarding Hamas’ human shields strategy contrasts sharply with the numerous UN reports containing detailed criticisms of Israel’s military conduct in Gaza. These included repeated declarations that Israel engaged in “indiscriminate” attacks, meaning attacks that violated the law of war because they failed to distinguish between combatants and civilians or between military targets and civilian objects.

Several UN reports also accused Israeli forces of illegally attacking hospitals, often disregarding evidence that those facilities were being used by Hamas for military purposes. In effect, the reports assessed Israeli conduct in isolation, stripped of the factual and legal context created by Hamas’ violations.

At the ICC, a similar pattern emerged of blaming Israel for casualties foreseeably resulting from Hamas’ systematic use of human shields, while entirely ignoring Hamas’ violations of the shielding prohibition. ICC Prosecutor Karim Khan, in announcing his arrest warrant applications for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, accused them of responsibility for war crimes including “willful killing” and “murder” of civilian or other protected persons, and “intentionally directing attacks against a civilian population.” ICC Pre-Trial Chamber I subsequently issued arrest warrants for both Netanyahu and Gallant, including “for the war crime of intentionally directing attacks against the civilian population of Gaza.”

The warrants were issued despite the fact that the IDF responded to Hamas’ incessant human shields use by “implement[ing] more precautions to prevent civilian harm than any military in history—above and beyond what international law requires and more than the U.S. did in its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan,” according to John Spencer, the chair of urban warfare studies at West Point. The High Level Military Group, comprising retired senior military officers from five NATO member nations, similarly assessed Israel’s civilian harm precautions as “unprecedented” in an amicus brief to the ICC.

These IDF precautions included daily pauses in battles, precision guided munitions, calls/texts/fliers ahead of particular strikes, safe zones, and evacuation requests. Israeli Air Force planners reportedly canceled one in every two planned air strikes during the Gaza war, due to the number of civilians present being deemed disproportionate to the target’s military value.

Although Khan also announced arrest warrant applications for Yahya Sinwar and two other Hamas officials, he did so for crimes against the Israeli residents killed and seized on Oct. 7. Despite the strong evidence of Hamas’ use of human shields in Gaza—by Sinwar in particular—Khan’s announcement made no reference to that war crime.

The ICJ’s provisional orders in South Africa’s genocide case against Israel similarly blamed the IDF for civilian casualties without acknowledging Hamas’ role in generating them. In its May 2024 provisional measures order, the ICJ asserted that Israel’s military operations in Gaza had “resulted in ... a large number of deaths and injuries,” and said “the Court is not convinced that the evacuation measures that Israel affirms to have undertaken to enhance the security of civilians in the Gaza Strip ... are sufficient to alleviate the immense risk to which the Palestinian population is exposed as a result of [Israel’s] military offensive.”

Yet the ICJ majority, in that May 2024 order and prior provisional measures orders, made no reference to Hamas exposing Gaza civilians to immense risk by using them as human shields, including by discouraging and blocking the Palestinian population from complying with Israel’s evacuation requests. ICJ Vice President Julia Sebutinde, in her May 2024 dissent, criticized the majority for this lack of balance, pointing to Hamas’ use of human shields and asserting that “the responsibility for the suffering of the Palestinians of Gaza does not lie only with Israel and nor is it correct to say that Israel has failed to act to alleviate that suffering.”

Because South Africa filed its genocide case in the ICJ against only Israel—and the ICJ has no jurisdiction over non-state actors—the court inevitably focused its orders on Israel. But this did not preclude the court from noting Hamas’ human shields use. Indeed, the court did call on Hamas to release the hostages.

The pattern of ignoring Hamas’ use of human shields continued in the ICJ’s October 2025 advisory opinion on Israel’s obligations regarding the UN and the Palestine conflict. ICJ Vice President Sebutinde, in her separate opinion, said that “[r]egrettably, the Court in its reasoning disregards the complex realities of urban warfare, including the exceptionally high population density of Gaza, the use by Hamas of Palestinian civilians and Israeli hostages as human shields and its militarization of civilian infrastructure such as hospitals and schools.” Sebutinde opined that “these factors are materially relevant to the assessment of both the scope and the implementation of Israel’s obligations under international humanitarian law and international human rights law.”

The ICJ’s October 2025 Obligations advisory opinion was requested by the UN General Assembly pursuant to Article 96 of the UN Charter, which provides that the assembly “may request the International Court of Justice to give an advisory opinion on any legal question.” The assembly made its request in a December 2024 resolution, which posed a question only regarding Israel’s obligations and not those of Hamas.  Sebutinde criticized the General Assembly for this, asserting that it “asked the Court to render a one-sided opinion on the legal obligations of one of the parties to the conflict (Israel), thereby shielding the other party to the conflict (Palestine) and its allies from judicial scrutiny of their policies and practices.” But, as Sebutinde pointed out, the court had the flexibility, which it did not exercise, to nevertheless refer to, analyze, and factor in Hamas’ use of human shields.

UN, ICC, and ICJ Practice Regarding Shielding in Other Conflicts

There is no evident legal or other principled reason why the UN, ICC, and ICJ have persistently chosen to ignore Hamas’ use of human shields. Although Hamas is not a party to the Geneva Conventions, the prohibition on using human shields is binding on non-state actors, including Hamas, as a matter of customary international law.

Consistent with this, the UN Security Council condemned the Taliban’s use “of civilians as human shields” in at least 18 different resolutions. UN officials and bodies outside the Security Council have previously explicitly condemned the use of human shields by the Islamic State, the Houthis, Boko Haram in Nigeria, militias in Congo and the Central African Republic, the Moro Liberation Front in the Philippines, and Al-Shabab in Somalia.

For example, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, in March 2017, stated as follows: “ISIL’s strategy of using children, men and women to shield themselves from attack is cowardly and disgraceful. It breaches the most basic standards of human dignity and morality. Under international humanitarian law, the use of human shields amounts to a war crime[.]”

Yet on repeated occasions when UN officials and bodies criticized Israel’s conduct of the Gaza war prior to or following Secretary-General Guterres’s one admission—on Nov. 6, 2023—of Hamas’ human shields use, those officials and bodies disregarded Hamas’ commission of that war crime. The selective silence surrounding Hamas’ human shields use evidently reflects not a legal or factual constraint but a series of politicized institutional choices to hold accountable only one side of the Israel-Hamas conflict.

The UN, ICC, and ICJ have persistently treated Hamas “as a non-actor in Gaza,” concluded the Henry Jackson Society report. “It is as if the IDF is not engaging in combat with a potent military force in Gaza” that is incessantly hiding under and behind human shields but rather “is attacking defenceless civilians for the sole purpose of killing them,” said the report.

ICJ Vice President Sebutinde has similarly criticized the UN’s “framing,” which “appears to single out Israel as the sole belligerent in the Gaza conflict.” That framing, said Sebutinde, created “a presumption that Israel alone bears responsibility for the deteriorating humanitarian situation in Gaza, which risks overlooking both Israel’s legitimate security concerns and the contributions of other actors[.]” As the High Level Military Group noted in its amicus submission to the ICC, a world in which terrorist adversaries are “absolved of all responsibility” while Western militaries facing them are “committed to fighting according to the law” is dangerous and “untenable.”

How Hamas’ Human Shields Strategy Advanced Its Objectives

Hamas’ Oct.7, 2023, attack was reportedly driven by information warfare objectives rather than an assessment that the organization was capable of seizing and holding Israeli territory. These information warfare objectives included both derailing the advancing Israeli-Saudi peace process by delegitimizing Israel and also shoring up Hamas’ fading public support in Gaza by reinvigorating the organization’s revolutionary credentials. Hamas’ strategy inverted the usual relationship between information operations and kinetic action: Whereas information operations are typically deployed in support of kinetic warfare objectives (for example, seizing and holding territory), Hamas’ kinetic operations were deployed in support of information warfare objectives.

Hamas’ human shields strategy succeeded. By maximizing civilian harm, Hamas positioned itself in much of the world as the oppressed party and Israel as the oppressor. This narrative gained traction despite Israel, according to West Point’s John Spencer and the High Level Military Group, exceeding law of armed conflict requirements and implementing more measures to reduce civilian harm than any military in history, resulting in a lower ratio of civilian to fighter casualties in Gaza than in other urban conflicts involving Western militaries.

As civilian casualties mounted, the Israeli-Saudi peace process stalled and international pressure on Israel intensified, including restrictions on arms transfers. Many of the casualties were the foreseeable result of Hamas’ incessant use of human shields. But the failure of international institutions designed to uphold the international rule of law—the UN, ICC, and ICJ—to recognize and factor in Hamas’ use of human shields ensured that the vast majority of blame for the casualties was instead, and wrongly, apportioned to Israel.

Dangerous Precedent for Future Conflicts

The implications of the UN, ICC, and ICJ disregarding Hamas’ incessant use of human shields, let alone the central role of human shields in Hamas’ strategic planning and goals, extend well beyond Gaza. The Islamic State, the Taliban, and Libyan, Serbian, and Iraqi forces have all previously used human shields in conflict with NATO and U.S. forces.

In 2019, NATO Supreme Allied Commander Gen. Curtis Scaparrotti formally warned the alliance’s political and military decision-making bodies that NATO’s adversaries “have not hesitated to use the prohibited practice of human shields” as it forces NATO troops “to choose between not taking action against legitimate military targets or seeing their actions, and the overall mission, delegitimized.” He urged NATO states to strengthen national enforcement of the prohibition, including through criminalization, sanctions, and prosecutions.

Little to nothing has been done to implement Scaparrotti’s recommendations. No sanctions have been imposed pursuant to a U.S. law, enacted in 2018, which mandates sanctions against individuals involved in human shields use by Hamas or Hezbollah. Other NATO states lack comparable sanctions regimes, and there have been no documented European or Canadian convictions for human shields use, even though several NATO member states have the requisite universal jurisdiction laws to prosecute war crimes, including human shields use, even when the crime was committed abroad, by a perpetrator who is not a national of that state, against a victim who is not a national of that state.

The risk of continued inaction is considerable. If human shielding was so successful when deployed against Israel by Hamas with its relatively limited information operations, imagine how impactful it would be if wielded against Western militaries by the People’s Republic of China, with its immense media access to Western citizens and considerable disdain for the law of armed conflict.

The UN, ICC, and ICJ’s disregard of terrorist groups’ use of human shields has spurred a backlash among some American leaders. In his confirmation hearing, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, specifically citing terrorist groups’ impunity for “us[ing] civilians as human shields,” opposed both “burdensome rules of engagement that make it impossible for us to win these wars” and subjecting the U.S. military to the dictates of the UN, ICC, and ICJ.

The United States benefits from the international rule of law, especially when it comes to war, in which a race to the bottom would be horrific. Future U.S. and allied warfighters would benefit greatly from an initiative now to end impunity for human shields use.

A Path Forward

The U.S. and its allies should robustly implement the NATO supreme allied commander’s recommendations for national actions to counter shields use. They should also cooperate to ensure that the UN, ICC, and ICJ stop disregarding Hamas’ use of human shields.

The United States is the UN system’s largest financial contributor. In February 2025, President Trump ordered a review of U.S. funding of UN bodies that “act contrary to the interests of the United States while attacking our allies and propagating anti-Semitism.” The U.S. has three times previously used budgetary leverage to extract significant UN reforms. Ensuring that the UN starts addressing Hamas’ human shields use should be a top priority for the U.S.’s current budgetary leverage.

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The persistent failure of the UN, ICC, and ICJ to address Hamas’ incessant, systematic, and strategic use of human shields has undermined both the overall credibility of these institutions and the accuracy of their legal and factual assessments of the Gaza war. It has also incentivized other terrorist groups, as well as authoritarian militaries, to increase their use of human shields in future conflicts. Correcting this failure—through targeted sanctions, criminal accountability, and reform of these international institutions—is essential not only for addressing the Gaza conflict but also for protecting U.S. and allied warfighters, and minimizing civilian harm, in future wars. If human shielding continues to pay strategic dividends, it will be used more often, with predictably catastrophic consequences for civilians caught in the middle.