human shield
Sign in to savedeliberate placement of non-combatants in or around combat targets to deter an enemy from attacking those targets
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Encyclopedic overview
Human shield war postcard by Sergey Solomko
A human shield is a non-combatant (or a group of non-combatants) who either volunteers or is forced to shield a target in order to deter the enemy from attacking it. The 20th and 21st centuries had numerous operations that used involuntary human shields. Use of voluntary human shields have also had use, particularly with Mahatma Gandhi using the concept as a tool of resistance.
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “human shield” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.