shields

US president says if reports that captives are being moved above ground to hinder Israeli assault are true, ‘all bets are off’.

United States President Donald Trump has warned Hamas against moving the Israeli captives in Gaza above ground to hinder Israel’s military campaign, renewing his call for their release.

Trump wrote in a social media post on Monday that he had read a news report indicating that Hamas would use the captives as “human shields” amid the relentless Israeli bombardment of Gaza.

“I hope the Leaders of Hamas know what they’re getting into if they do such a thing,” the US president said.

“This is a human atrocity, the likes of which few people have ever seen before. Don’t let this happen or, ALL ‘BETS’ ARE OFF. RELEASE ALL HOSTAGES NOW!”

Trump has regularly posted threats against Hamas. But with most of the group’s leaders already killed, and Israel having destroyed much of Gaza in a campaign that experts and rights groups say is a genocide, it is not clear how the US president can further punish Hamas.

In recent weeks, Israel has been carrying out a systematic campaign to level what remains of Gaza City, targeting residential towers and schools, and forcing a mass evacuation of the area. The United Nations’s special envoy said on Monday that the offensive is part of a broader campaign of ethnic cleansing.

Trump’s warning on Monday comes less than a week after Israel killed five Hamas members and a Qatari security official while trying to assassinate senior Hamas leaders in the Qatari capital, Doha. Those targeted were involved in negotiating a ceasefire and captives’ proposal put forward by the US president himself.

Hamas said its top officials survived the strikes, which Trump said he opposed. On Monday, Trump repeated his assertion that Israel would not be striking Qatar again.

Days before the Doha attack, Trump had issued what he called a “last warning” for Hamas.

On Monday, Trump again denied reports that he had advance knowledge of the Israeli attack. He suggested that he learned about it from the media – a claim that contradicts his previous assertion that he was notified about the strikes by the US military shortly before they were launched.

Asked how he found out about the strikes, the US president told reporters, “The same way you did.”

‘Human shields’

On Sunday, Israel’s public broadcaster, Kan, reported that Hamas was moving Israeli captives to homes and tents to pressure Israel to halt its bombardment campaign in Gaza City.

The Israeli military has long used Palestinians as human shields, both in the occupied West Bank and Gaza, according to numerous media reports, witness testimonies and video footage.

Last year, Al Jazeera obtained footage of Israeli soldiers sending Palestinian prisoners into tunnels and buildings in Gaza to ensure they were not rigged with explosives.

Israeli authorities regularly justify their atrocities in Gaza by claiming that Hamas uses civilians as human shields.

Over the past days, the Israeli military has been stepping up its attacks on the city and across the territory with hundreds of strikes.

On Sunday, Israeli Minister of Defence Israel Katz shared footage of a high-rise building in Gaza being obliterated by an Israeli strike, with the caption: “The house of cards. The skyline of Gaza is changing.”

Thirty years ago, the coming-of-age romantic comedy “Clueless” opened in movie theaters and went on to become an enduring American pop culture touchstone.

“I’m thrilled that people love it and continue to love it,” the movie’s star, Alicia Silverstone, said in a recent conversation in New York. “Young people. Old people. It’s really gone on and on, and obviously that’s lovely.”

AMC Networks is counting on Silverstone’s multigenerational appeal to help boost the New York-based media company’s streaming service Acorn TV, which specializes in British dramas and other programs from overseas.

Silverstone is the lead in the new Acorn original series “Irish Blood,” which premiered Monday. She plays hard-bitten Los Angeles divorce lawyer Fiona Sharpe, who heads to Ireland to resolve a mystery involving the father who abandoned her as a child.

AMC has also signed the imperishable Brooke Shields to star in another Acorn project titled “You’re Killing Me.” She portrays a mystery novelist who teams with a young wannabe writer and influencer to investigate murders in a small New England town. The series starts shooting this summer and is set to premiere in 2026.

Why put two iconic American actors on a streaming platform with a well-defined niche of providing viewers with international locations and accents that at times require closed-captioning even when the language is English?

Even the small players in streaming have to get bigger.

AMC does not have the deep pockets to compete with the likes of Netflix, Prime Video and Disney+. The company has blazed its own digital path by serving dedicated audiences who will pay for an additional streaming service that caters to their passions, such as Shudder for horror fans and HIDIVE for anime lovers.

The company’s suite of streaming services has around 10.4 million customers. Even with that modest figure, AMC Networks’ streaming revenue has steadily grown to the point where it will soon surpass what the company earns from its traditional TV channels such as AMC, BBC America, Sundance TV and WE, which continue to see subscriber declines because of cord-cutting.

AMC has found that the strong fan bases for its niche services are willing to absorb price increases and are less likely to cancel. The company has managed to keep its streaming platforms priced at less than $10 a month.

Brooke Shields is set to star next year in “You’re Killing Me,” a new small-town mystery from Acorn TV.

(Evelyn Freja / For The Times)

Now AMC Networks is looking to accelerate its subscriber growth and Acorn — the most popular and profitable of its standalone offerings — is seen as the platform best suited to the task.

“It’s a service we really believe in,” Courtney Thomasma, executive vice president for streaming and content strategy at AMC Networks, told The Times in a recent interview. “Over the last year, we’ve been really focused on looking for ways to continue to raise awareness of the brand and invite new viewers in who we know would also love it. We’re doing that with a focus on investing in the brand and inviting bigger talent that’s more familiar to North American audiences.”

Many fans of Acorn — which started out as a direct marketer of British TV series on home video and was acquired by AMC in 2018 — are what Thomasma calls “armchair travelers” who want to take in a French vineyard or the cobblestone streets of Chelsea. But AMC believes aligning Acorn more closely to the mystery genre will widen its appeal.

A monthlong promotional campaign under the banner of Murder Mystery May — which featured a number of season premieres — drove Acorn TV subscription sign-ups to a four-year high. The 20 million hours watched during the month was the best ever for the service, according to AMC.

The emphasis on mystery provides Acorn the latitude to cast Silverstone and Shields. One way AMC attracts star talent is the opportunity to put their own creative stamp on their programs. “They become as invested in the success of the projects as we are,” Thomasma said.

Silverstone came on to “Irish Blood” as executive producer and became involved in the development of the series. She was involved in the hiring of key positions in the production and worked with the writers. She’s happy with the result.

“I thought it was quirky and also an emotionally deep drama,” Silverstone said. “There’s a lot for me to do.”

Shields and writer Robin Bernheim pitched the generation gap tandem at the center of “You’re Killing Me” to AMC, and the actor remains deeply involved in the process as shooting begins. “This is the first time I’ve ever had this much creative control as an executive producer,” Shields said in an interview. “I feel lucky that they entrusted me to do what we’re doing.”

Silverstone, left, with Ruth Codd in “Irish Blood.”

(Szymon Lazewski / Acorn TV)

Acorn teams with production partners around the world and generates revenue from selling some of its series for second runs on international broadcasters and PBS. AMC spends in the range of $1 million per episode for its cost-efficient series, which are heavy on dialogue and largely car-chase free. The audience is older — they are avid readers who are likely to subscribe to newspapers, watch cable news and PBS, and enjoy solving puzzles.

And though Acorn is hoping to attract more younger subscribers, the service won’t be losing its British accent.

Acorn recently launched “Art Detectives” with Stephen Moyer, who also is an executive producer. The series, about a Heritage Crime Unit that solves murders connected to art and antiques, had the strongest premiere in the streamer’s history.

Later this year, it will offer a new six-episode series starring Matthew Lewis, known for his Neville Longbottom role in the Harry Potter films. Based on the series of Canon Clements mystery novels by the Rev. Richard Coles, “Murder Before Evensong” is a co-production with British broadcaster Channel 5.

“We pride ourselves on being a boutique neighborhood store, the kind that you walk in, you know the owner [and] the owner knows you,” Thomasma said. “We have deep connection to our audience.”

A local activist who handed out protective face shields to protesters last month during demonstrations against the Trump administration’s chaotic immigration raids was indicted by a federal grand jury Wednesday.

Alejandro Orellana, a 29-year-old member of the Boyle Heights-based community organization Centro CSO, faces charges of conspiracy and aiding and abetting civil disorder, court records show.

According to the indictment, Orellana and at least two others drove around downtown L.A. in a pickup truck distributing Uvex Bionic face shields and other items to a crowd engaged in a protest near the federal building on Los Angeles Street on June 9.

Prosecutors allege Orellana was helping protesters withstand less-lethal munitions being deployed by Los Angeles police officers and Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies after an unlawful assembly had been declared.

Orellana is due in court on Thursday morning. An e-mail to his federal public defender seeking comment was not immediately returned.

U.S. Atty. Bill Essayli, a former California Assemblyman appointed by President Trump, has promised to aggressively prosecute anyone who interferes with Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations or harms police during protests. Federal prosecutors have brought at least 14 cases related to last month’s demonstrations and Essayli promised more people will be charged.

Asked how handing out defensive equipment was a crime during a news conference last month, Essayli insisted Orellana was specifically handing out supplies to violent demonstrators.

“He wasn’t handing masks out at the beach. … They’re covering their faces. They’re wearing backpacks. These weren’t peaceful protesters,” he said. “They weren’t holding up signs, with a political message. They came to do violence.”

Essayli described anyone who remained at a protest scene after an unlawful assembly was declared as a “rioter” and said peaceful protesters “don’t need a face shield.”

Orellana, who works for United Parcel Service, has no criminal record and previously served in the U.S. Marines, according to Carlos Montes, a fellow member of Centro CSO.

Montes said he believes Essayli is specifically targeting Centro CSO for its pro-immigrant activism, noting FBI agents seized another member’s cellphone last week as part of their investigation into Orellana.

“It’s ridiculous charges. We’re demanding they drop the charges now. They’re insignificant, ridiculous,” Montes said. “The most it amounts to is that he was passing out personal protective equipment, which includes boxes of water, hand sanitizer and snacks.”

A spokesperson for the U.S. Marine Corps did not immediately respond to a request for Orellana’s service record.

Montes also challenged Essayli’s argument that peaceful protesters have no need for protective equipment, pointing to myriad instances in which people have been seriously injured by Los Angeles police and county sheriff’s deputies in recent years.

A Times investigation last month highlighted incidents in which protesters allege Los Angeles Police Department officers fired rubber rounds and other crowd control munitions without warning in recent weeks, causing demonstrators and members of the media to suffer broken bones, concussions and other forms of severe harm.

Times staff writer Brittny Mejia contributed to this report.

A recent report by The Associated Press that exposed the Israeli military’s “systematic” use of Palestinians as human shields has shone a light on an illegal practice that has become commonplace over the 19-month war in Gaza and parallel offensives in the West Bank.

The report, published on Saturday, featured the testimonies of seven Palestinians who had been used as human shields in Gaza as well as the occupied West Bank, with two Israeli military officers confirming the ubiquity of the practice, which is considered a violation of international law.

Responding to the allegations, Israel’s military told the news agency that using civilians as shields in its operations was strictly prohibited and that several cases were under investigation.

So what are human shields? How widely have they been used by the Israeli military? And is Israel likely to launch a crackdown any time soon?

What are human shields, and how has Israel used them?

Under international humanitarian law (IHL), the term “human shields” refers to the use of civilians or other protected persons, whether voluntary or involuntary, in order to shield military targets from attacks.

The use of human shields in warfare is prohibited under IHL, but Israeli soldiers have allegedly employed it widely during the Gaza genocide.

Earlier this year, Israeli newspaper Haaretz published the first-hand testimony of an Israeli soldier who said that the practice had been used “six times a day” in his unit and that it had effectively been “normalised” in military ranks.

Back in August, the newspaper had revealed that Palestinians used as human shields in Gaza tended to be in their 20s and were used for periods of up to a week by units, which took pride in “locating” detainees to send into tunnel shafts and buildings.

“It’s become part of [Israel’s] military culture,” said Nicola Perugini, co-author of Human Shields: A History of People in the Line of Fire, noting the “huge archive” of evidence provided, not only by human rights groups, but also by soldiers, who were until recently posting evidence of Palestinians being used as “fodder” on social media with an apparent sense of total impunity.

“Israeli army investigations have proven throughout the decades to be non-investigations,” Perugini said, noting that documentation of the practice, forbidden by Protocol 1 to the Geneva Conventions, started during the second Intifada of the early 2000s.

“What we have now in the live-streamed genocide is the most documented archive of human shielding in the history of the different wars between Israel and the Palestinians,” he said.

“What we have discovered is precisely that it is a systematic practice.”

How has Israel responded to allegations?

Throughout the conflict, the Israeli military’s response to allegations has been to withhold comment, to point to a lack of details, or, when faced with undeniable proof, to announce a probe.

Last year, Israel declined to respond to a range of allegations put to it by Al Jazeera’s Investigative Unit, which examined thousands of photos and videos – the bulk of them posted online by Israeli soldiers – and testimonies pointing to a number of potential war crimes, including the use of human shields.

Among the atrocities revealed by the team in the resulting documentary was the case of Jamal Abu al-Ola, a detainee forced to act as a messenger by the Israelis. Footage showed the young man dressed in a white hazmat suit, with hands bound and head wrapped in a yellow cloth, telling displaced people at the Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis to evacuate. His mother followed him out, and witnessed him being shot dead by a sniper.

Commenting on the case for the documentary, Rodney Dixon, an international law expert, said that al-Ola had been used as a “military asset”, which was “in many ways the definition of using persons as a human shield”.

This year, the military pushed back on calls to investigate a report on an 80-year-old man forced to act as a human shield in Gaza City, saying that “additional details” were needed.

The joint report from Israeli outlet The Hottest Place in Hell and +972 Magazine revealed a horrific new dimension of the so-called “mosquito procedure”, with anonymous Israeli soldiers recounting that a senior officer had placed an explosive cord around the man’s neck, threatening to blow his head off if he made any false moves.

Ordered afterwards to flee his home in Gaza City’s Zeitoun neighbourhood, the man was shot dead with his wife by another battalion.

However, the military will acknowledge violations when confronted with undeniable evidence provoking widespread outrage, such as last year’s video of wounded Palestinian man Mujahed Azmi, strapped to the hood of an army jeep during a raid on the West Bank city of Jenin.

That particular case was described as “human shielding in action” by Francesca Albanese, the United Nations’ special rapporteur to the occupied Palestinian territory.

In a statement, Israel’s military said its forces were fired at and exchanged fire, wounding a suspect and apprehending him. It added that the “conduct of the forces in the video” did not “conform to the values” of the military and that the incident would be investigated.

However, as Perugini observes, the very reason why the International Criminal Court (ICC) has issued arrest warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant for alleged war crimes in Gaza is because legal experts doubt Israel’s ability to investigate itself.

Who issues the orders to use human shields?

Despite vast evidence, the question of whether the military will be launching a crackdown aimed at banishing the apparently systematic practice is moot. Even so, pressure for accountability is growing.

Rights groups say the practice of using human shields has been going on in the occupied Palestinian territories for decades. Breaking the Silence, a whistle-blower group gathering testimonies of former Israeli soldiers, cites evidence of what one high-ranking officer posted to Bethlehem in the occupied West Bank back in 2002 called “neighbour procedure”.

“You order a Palestinian to accompany you and to open the door of the house you want to enter, to knock on the door and ask to enter, with a very simple objective: if the door blows up, a Palestinian will be blown up, and soldiers won’t be blown up,” said the officer, ranked as a major.

In 2005, an Israeli Supreme Court ruling explicitly barred the practice. Five years later, two soldiers were convicted of using a nine-year-old boy as a human shield to check suspected booby traps in the Gaza City suburb of Tal al-Hawa.

It was reportedly the first such conviction in Israel.

But the military’s use of human shields appears to have been normalised since then, particularly over the past 19 months of war in Gaza.

Indeed, there are indications that orders may be coming from the very top.

Haaretz’s investigation from last August cited sources as saying that former Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi was among the senior officers aware of the use of Palestinians in Gaza as human shields.

And this week’s report by the AP cited an anonymous Israeli officer as saying that the practice had become ubiquitous by mid-2004 in Gaza, with every infantry unit using a Palestinian to clear houses by the time he finished his service, and with orders “to bring a mosquito” often being issued via radio.

The report also cited an anonymous Israeli sergeant as saying that his unit had tried to refuse to use human shields in Gaza in 2024, but was told they had no choice, a high-ranking officer telling them they shouldn’t worry about international humanitarian law.

Responding to claims in the AP report, the Israeli military told The Jerusalem Post on Sunday that it would investigate the claims “if further details are provided”.

“In several cases, investigations by the Military Police Criminal Investigation Division were opened following suspicions that the military was involving Palestinians in military missions. These investigations are ongoing, and naturally, no further details can be provided at this time,” it said.

In March, Haaretz reported that Israel’s military police were investigating six cases in which Israeli soldiers were alleged to have used Palestinians as human shields after the publication of a Red Cross report earlier in the year that highlighted the abuses.

In the face of growing evidence that Palestinians are systematically being used as fodder for the Israeli military machine, in a war that has already killed more than 54,000 people, the military may find it increasingly difficult to kick the biggest can of all down the road.

Said Perugini: “When you are in a genocide, then human shielding becomes a tool for something else. It becomes part of a different kind of crime, of the crime of crimes.”

Boxing world champion Claressa Shields says she is “done” with mixed martial arts after competing in three fights with the PFL.

Shields, 30, is unbeaten in boxing and a multiple-weight undisputed champion, but has fought sporadically in MMA since 2021, achieving a 2-1 record.

Her last MMA bout was a points win over Kelsey de Santis and the American says she will now be focusing on boxing.

“It was fun, but I don’t have enough time to train for it. It takes six to eight months just to get ready to defend takedowns. Even though I got a lot better and put in the time, I broke my arm twice. It was fun, and I enjoyed every fight I did,” Shields told Ariel Helwani, external.

“I’m already great in boxing, and to be great like that in MMA, I would have to train consistently for at least three to four years.

“I did really well in MMA. It was fun, but it was too hard.”

Shields took a two-and-a-half-year break between her second and third MMA fights.

The Michigan native recently added the undisputed heavyweight title to her world title collection.

Shields has become world champion in five different weight classes and is undefeated in 16 fights.

The Olympic gold medalist said she did have ambitions of becoming an MMA world champion, but admitted her family were keen for her to focus on boxing.

“My family never wanted me to do it,” she added.

“I did it because I wanted to prove a point, and I proved that point to myself three times, though you could say twice because I won twice.”