The man was reportedly told if he did not carry out the searches, the forces would detonate the bomb [GETTY]
Israeli soldiers tied explosives around the neck of an 80-year-old Palestinian man and used him as a human shield, forcing him search for explosives before killing him and his wife, an investigation has revealed.
Israeli news site HaMakom revealed the a senior officer in the Nahal Brigade threatened to blow up the man’s head unless he searched the Al-Zaytoun neighbourhood of Gaza City for explosives in May.
The incident happened as Israeli forces launched their third invasion of the areaÂ
HaMakom says the soldiers present at the time of the incident told it that they found the elderly couple after clearing the neighbourhood.
They said the couple’s children had fled but they had no choice but to stay. They added that the man was walking with a cane and wouldn’t have been able to walk all the way to Khan Younis.
It was at that point the forces decided to use the “Mosquito Procedure”, where Israeli soldiers would force Palestinians to serve as human shields in combat zones at gunpoint.
One of the soldiers tied a detonating fuse to a bomb and tied it around the elderly man’s neck as a leash “so that he wouldn’t run away”.
“They explained to him that if he did something wrong or not as we wanted, the person behind him would pull the rope and his head would be severed from his body,” the soldiers told HaMakom.
The man was forced to walk around with them for eight hours, knowing there was a soldier who could detonate the bomb. His wife was left at home, unaware of what was happening, and kept under surveillance by some soldiers.
“He entered each of the houses before us, so that if there were weapons or a terrorist in it – it would be used on him, and not on us,” the soldiers said.
After the search was over, the soldiers ordered the couple to evacuate on foot to Khan Younis in the south, but another group of soldiers shot them dead.
The soldiers say that they failed to let the second battalion know about the couple, and they were consequently shot.
“They died like that, in the street,” the soldiers added.
HaMakom found the Mosquito Procedure was also used at the end of August, when a Palestinian man was shot after being forced to search for boobytraps in homes Rafah.
The Israeli army has denied using the procedure during its war in the Gaza Strip, but soldiers told HaMakom this is untrue, saying the routing “has become standard practice” and Is in a grey area within the army.
The Israeli High Court of Justice has banned using civilians as human shields.
