"they're using civilians as human shields" seems to be a favorite of fascist sympathizers and genocide-enablers. Of course they've been deploying it very often this week. "Hamas uses civilians as human shields". The monsters.
It always rings familiar to me because it's also a favorite of Argentine dictatorship apologists. I grew up hearing this shit. "Well, sure the dictatorship went too far sometimes, but they were fighting monsters! Don't you know the guerilla fighters (every single person targeted by the military was a guerilla fighter btw) would use civilians as a shield? They would hide behind children and babies and pregnant women! Hell, women would get pregnant on purpose to use their bellies as a shield1"
Of course they never say the next part out loud, but it's always implied: "that's why they had to shoot them. That's why the soldiers and the police had to murder all those civilians and children and babies and pregnant women, to get at the monsters. Otherwise, who knows how many other civilians they would hide behind, how many more innocents the soldiers would be forced to kill." The monsters.
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Incidentally, one of the dictatorship's many atrocities was stealing babies from the people they arrested, tortured, murdered and made to disappear. They would give the babies away (sometimes sell them) to "proper" and "good" families. No records of anything of course. There's still hundreds of Argentines that don't actually know where they come from. The organization "Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo" is still working to find them. It started as a group of women whose children were kidnapped and made to disappear by the dictatorship, trying to find their children's children. It's been 46 years and they recently found grandchild number 133. And I think back to that "women would get pregnant just to use their bellies as a shield" defense. How convenient for them, to see these women not as mothers, but as monsters. How justified in their actions they must have felt, separating a mother from her newborn child, sometimes letting her live exactly until she gave birth, and then discard her, dispose of her body because she's just that, a body now. She was a monster, became a body and soon, she'll just be a collection of bodyparts, mingling with others, never to be found, never to be identified, never to be given a name again because names are for people. It's lamentable, that work, but hey, they can now give this baby to a family that would "actually" love it. How necessary their work must have felt.
It's also a really selective way to respond in particular in a conflict involving settler colonialism. Because the whole point of settlement is to use civilians as human shields. Occupied land is hard to defend, because the local population tends to hate you, and any invaders or insurgents will mostly be seen as liberators. But if you put your own people there, with families and schools and such, then (a) they will be your first line of defense in any attack or uprising, and (b) any repressive action you take is for the sake of defending civilians.
This is a very good strategy, unfortunately. It's the one Zionists have used since even before the State of Israel was founded, and they got it from Americans, Australians, Japanese in Korea and Taiwan, the British in Northern Ireland, and so many more. And this is one of the main reasons that such settlements are banned in international law.
Also, I wish this didn't need saying but it probably does: none of this is a justification of violence against individual civilian settlers. The government that placed them is at fault, but the people getting placed are not only largely innocent, they're also often victims themselves. No one with a stable, happy home chooses to live in a war zone. Settlers tend to be refugees, or poor people with no other way to acquire property. Not to mention, you know, the literal children.
