Israel released evidence this weekend showing that Shifa Hospital in Gaza was a Hamas headquarters.
This was not exactly a secret. Reporters have known this for at least 15 years.
But one thing happened on Saturday which has implications for international law.
Workers at Shifa sang a song saying, "We will not leave."
Meaning, they are saying that even if Israel tells them to leave in order to attack the Hamas targets in the lower levels, they are saying that they would prefer to be human shields for Hamas.
Does this change their civilian status under international law?
One of the giants of international law in war is Yoram Dinstein, and he is quoted in an ICRC monograph by legal scholar Jean-Francois Queguiner as saying "civilians who act as voluntary human shieldscan be regarded as directly participating in hostilities, with the result that they aredeprived of immunity against direct attack and have no effect whatsoever on acommander’s assessment of proportionality."
Israel's' High Court agrees, saying in 1 2006 case that ‘if they do soof their own free will, out of support for the terrorist organization, they should beseen as persons taking direct part in the hostilities.'
Another legal scholar, Michael N. Schmitt, agrees that voluntary human shields are to be regardedas taking direct part in hostilities, and they lose their protection as civilians, but practically speaking they cannot be directly attacked. However, ‘voluntary shields … are excludedin the estimation of incidental injury when assessing proportionality.’
Other scholars say that the voluntary nature of their human shielding can affect the attacker's calculation of proportionality. In other words, the attacker must ensure that the civilian cost is proportional to the military benefit gained by the attack, and to many legal experts, the value, so to speak, of the voluntary human shields is lower than that of involuntary human shields (or what some call "proximate human shields") of wholly innocent civilians who happen to be between the attacker and the target. And according to some, their value is zero - Israel does not need to worry about killing them once they make clear that they are putting their bodies on the line for Hamas.
Meaning that by singing this song, to a small extent, these workers just made the hospital a little more likely to be attacked by Israel because their value as potential civilian casualties may be discounted.
Obviously, this doesn't apply to the involuntary human shields - patients or workers who did not participate in this little song. It doesn't make much of a difference in reality. If Israel decides that the hospital is a hugely important component of Hamas' military operations and sufficiently important Hamas members are under the hospital, it may very well decide to bomb the hospital after repeated warnings.
But these doctors and workers just cheapened their own lives under international law and they made such an attack a little more, not less, likely.