Human shield: what Wikipedia removed

A human shield is a civilian placed around a military target to deter an attack on it. Through 2005 the opening said international law considers the use of human shields to protect targets a war crime. Today the opening does not carry that designation, though the words war crime survive eleven times in the body. A reader arriving now learns what a human shield is and not that international law classifies its use as a war crime.

The word “war crime” appeared 1 times in this article’s opening at its peak, in 2005. Today the opening carries none; the body carries 11. Checked against the full current article on 2026-08-01.

Where this comes from

We saved this article’s opening paragraph at 6 moments between 2005 and 2025. Everything below is Wikipedia’s own text, quoted from those saved copies. The interactive version, with every snapshot side by side and each removal marked in place, is at ilroot.com/case/human-shield.

The tracked words, snapshot by snapshot

word	2005	2010	2015	2020	6 October 2023	2025
war crime	0	0	0	0	0	0
resistance	2	0	0	0	2	1

Counts are of the opening paragraph only, the part most readers, search engines and AI training sets ever quote.

What was taken out

• The definition of a human shield as a military term for using civilians to deter attack, dropped from the opening.
• The statement that using human shields increases civilian casualties and is highly illegal, dropped from the opening.
• The note that the tactic has been used by, among others, the Nazis, dropped from the opening.
• The statement that resulting civilian casualties from an attack on a human-shielded target raise separate legal questions, dropped from the opening.
• The discussion of how popular resistance movements that operate among civilian populations complicate the human-shield question, dropped from the opening.

How it opened then, and now

2005 (revision 16035733):

Human shield is a military term describing the use of civilians to deter an enemy from attacking certain targets—in particular military targets. In recent times civilian volunteers attempted to use it as an anti-war strategy. International law considers the use of human shields to protect targets a war crime . The Fourth Geneva Convention forbids the use of any civilian as a shield: “The presence of a protected person may not be used to render certain points or areas immune from military operations.” ( Geneva Convention Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War , August 12 , 1949 , 6 U.S.T. 3516, 75 U.N.T.S. 287, art. 28) It may also be used to describe the use of civilia…

2025 (revision 1298313893):

Non-combatants placed around a target to discourage enemy attacks For other uses, see Human shield (disambiguation) . 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 legitimate military 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.

Related

• The drift report: what changed across all 61,944 watched articles
• The case file for this article, with every snapshot and every marked removal
• Who made the cuts: removals grouped by the account that made them
• The live article on Wikipedia

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