What are Israelis supposed to do when Hamas use civilians as human shields?

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Expert perspectives from Palestinian voices

Norman Finkelstein said in this video:

I don't want to bore your listeners with the technicalities of international law. Human shielding is what's called a term of art. It's not a technical term which has been codified into law. It basically means the conscription of civilians either to protect combatants or to protect a military site. That's basically what is meant by human shielding. If you take the most extensive investigation of human shielding in the case of Hamas occurred after operation Cast Lead from the 26th of December 2008 to the 17th of January 2009. It was called "22 days of death and destruction". It found no evidence that Hamas was engaged in human shielding. It's just not true. This is a factual question. Now there's a separate question, it's called: taking all these feasible precautions when in a civilian area. That is to say, according to the laws of war which is called international humanitarian law IHL, if you are firing from a civilian area, you have to take all feasible precautions so as not to endanger civilians and there it has occasionally been the case that Hamas has been accused of not taking all feasible precautions. Obviously, if you are living in the most densely populated place on God's Earth, it's very hard to take all feasible precautions.

So, that's one side of the equation but if you look at all the human rights reports. All of them, going back to Operation Defensive Shield in 2002, Israel always takes Palestinians as human shields. That's just a standard practice. So you have scenes of Israelis. They take over a building. They put the Palestinians in the window and they fire from behind them. They have tank emplacements and they drag Palestinians to surround the tank placements. This isn't my imagination. There's a voluminous number of human rights publications which document, yes there's a lot of human shielding going on there, but it's all going on by Israel. That's all vanished and airbrushed from the commentary on the Israeli mowings of the lawn in Gaza.