Majid Rabah, 11, says he will always remember the "black day" that Israeli soldiers ordered him to open bags they thought were rigged with explosives.
"Every moment I remember what happened," he said in his home in Gaza City's Tel Al-Hawwa neighborhood Tuesday.
An Israeli military court gave a suspended sentence and a demotion Sunday to the two soldiers who used Majid as a human shield, in a ruling he and his family said did not do justice to the trauma.
"When will the child forget what happened? This cannot be compared to three month's [suspended] sentence," said Majid's mother, Fatima Rabah, 49. She added that she didn't expect justice from the Israeli court system, and would prefer that an international court take up the matter.
"This will give Israeli soldiers a license to do whatever they like to Palestinian children. Many Palestinian children have died from Israeli guns and no one punished them," she said. Majid himself said he was neither surprised nor satisfied by the Israeli court's ruling.
Human rights advocates also said Sunday's ruling sent the message that Israeli soldiers could violate Palestinian's rights without consequences.
"This ruling implies that it is allowed for Israeli soldiers to use Palestinians, including children, as human shields, without being punished," said Ayed Abu Eqtash of the organization Defense for Children International.
He said the case against the two soldiers was nothing more than an exercise in "Israeli PR" in the wake of judge Richard Goldstone's UN-mandated report on alleged war crimes in Gaza.
"Israel wants to show the international community that it is abiding by Goldstone's recommendations, but these procedures do not lead to accountability."
Eqtash said the Israeli Supreme Court issued a ruling in 2005 barring the military from using Palestinians as human shields, but DCI has documented 15 cases in which children were used as such since then.
In the most recent documented case, on 19 August, a DCI investigation found that a 13-year-old boy from a village near the West Bank city of Nablus was beaten then forced at gunpoint to open doors in a house where the army suspected a wanted Palestinian was hiding.
Majid was used as a human shield on 15 January 2009, just as Israel's 3-week offensive on Gaza appeared to be peaking. Israeli ground forces were smashing their way through Tel Al-Hawwa, a neighborhood of tower blocks south of Gaza City.
According to Majid and his mother, when Israeli soldiers began storming buildings in their area, families, nearly 40 people in all, in the building took shelter in the dirt-floor basement. While the others cowered in one corner, soldiers from the Givati Brigade arrived and ordered Majid, in Hebrew, to open two Samsonite duffle bags they found in a bathroom in the other corner.
In an affidavit provided to DCI, Majid gave more details: "The soldier approached me and grabbed my shirt from my neck and dragged me away. 'He's a child,' my mother began shouting. I thought they would kill me."
"I became very scared and wet my pants," he recalled, "I could not shout or say anything because I was too afraid. The soldier dragged me 20 meters away. He pointed his weapon at me. He was shouting at me and I did not understand him, so he grabbed me and pushed me against the wall."
Trembling with fear, he managed to open the first bag, which contained money and personal possessions brought to the basement by another resident in his building. When he was unable to open the other, one of the soldiers grabbed him by the hair, slapped him in the face, then shot the bag with his rifle, he said.
Later that day, Majid's mother said, soldiers came to the basement to separate men from women and children, who were told to leave the building. Fearing that the men were being arrested, the women and children fled to Al-Quds Hospital, a Red Crescent installation nearby.
That same day, Israeli warplanes bombed the hospital with white phosphorus, forcing patients, hospital workers and hundreds of sheltering civilians to flee amid gunfire and shelling. Majid, his two sisters, and mother left in an ambulance to the Red Cross center in Gaza.
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