Reservists to file ICC complaint on Hamas, PLO

My Truth founder Avihai Shorshan: The protests along the fence are not civilian demonstrations

A group of IDF reservists is set to file a complaint with the International Criminal Court in the Hague against Hamas and the Palestinian Authority for their use of human shields in the coming weeks.

My Truth, established following Operation Protective Edge in 2014 by Avihai Shorshan, has documented scores of testimonies from reservists in recent months describing the use of human shields to carry out terrorist attacks and other human rights violations.

“Our main goal is to be a non-political organization which presents the complete picture of what IDF soldiers face to the world, with no political angle. Just the situation on the ground,” Shorshan told The Jerusalem Post on Tuesday.

“When the March of Return protests began in April, our soldiers were going in front of Hamas terrorists every Friday and we saw them use women and soldiers to attack our soldiers. When we turn on CNN, nobody ever talks about the evil methods that Hamas uses, only our methods,” Shorshan said. “This is the right time to not only speak about Israel but about what they do as well.”

While the organization has collected some 33 testimonies from events from 2004 to present, ten of them will be submitted to the Hague in cooperation with lawyers from the International Legal Forum and the Jerusalem Institute of Justice, all of them relating to incidents which occurred over the past seven months of the weekly Great March of Return protests.

“The real shocking bit where I really couldn’t believe my eyes was when I saw an elderly man walking with a walking stick with a plastic bag and in that bag he had two bottles of gasoline which he intended to light and then throw towards Israeli soldiers,” said one testimony by a sniper who had been deployed to the protests along the fence until November.

“These soldiers were on the fence Friday after Friday until November,” Shorshan said.

“The main things about the protests along the fence is that they not simple civilian demonstrations. This is a terrorist attack against our fence, and we know exactly what Hamas plans to do when they cross the fence,” he said. “There is no Western country in the world which shares a fence with a terrorist organization, and we have four terror organizations on our borders. And some communities are just hundreds of meters from the fence.”

Other testimonies collected by the organization include cases of ambulances transporting weapons and terrorists, rockets being launched from kindergartens, women and children serving as human shields, and violations humanitarian cease-fires.

“When we talk about hasbara [political public relations], we speak Chinese. No one understands us. We are in the Middle East, and we need to talk to Hamas in their language. You don’t need to be immoral. We don’t need to bring our kids to the fence. But we cannot show them our weakness and cannot give them millions dollars in cash when we know it goes straight into the hands of terrorists,” he added.

Shorshan, who is currently in the United States to promote the project, is planning to share the reservists’ testimonies to the US Congress in February. of