Civilians in Gaza are in grave danger from Israel’s disregard for international law.
The vitriolic disputes taking place around the world over the war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza result in part from disagreements about the moral perspective from which to evaluate it. One way to find common ground is to analyze the conflict from a stance that is neither pro-Israeli nor pro-Palestinian but pro-civilian. To do so we can use the standards of international humanitarian law, also called the laws of war. Largely codified in the Geneva Conventions of 1949 and their Additional Protocols of 1977, those standards are not merely aspirational rules. They were drafted by the world’s leading militaries, reflecting their view of the best way to protect civilians. Virtually every government, including the United States, Israel, and Palestine, has endorsed them, either by formally ratifying them or by incorporating their standards into their military codes.
Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack on Israel, in which some 1,200 people were killed and 240 taken hostage, was a blatant violation. International humanitarian law prohibits killing or abducting civilians. It considers such acts “grave breaches,” or war crimes. Some have tried to justify the attack as a response to Israel’s decades-long occupation of Palestinian territory, the system of apartheid that the Israeli government has imposed there, and Israel’s own war crimes. (Building settlements in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, for instance, violates Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which prohibits an occupying power from transferring its population to occupied territory.) But that confuses ends and means. The perceived justness of one’s cause is distinct from the legality of how one fights. International humanitarian law makes clear that no cause justifies war crimes—including war crimes committed by the other side.
In response to Hamas’s attack, Israel has invaded Gaza and embarked on a military operation that has caused an enormous loss of life and leveled much of the enclave, which had been home to 2.1 million Palestinians. The Gaza Ministry of Health, which has generally proved reliable, reports that more than 37,000 Palestinians have been killed in the Strip since October 7, of which a large number are women and children. Is this death toll an unfortunate byproduct of war or a reflection of Israeli misconduct?
Some people defend Israel’s behavior in Gaza by pointing to Hamas’s atrocities of October 7, its indiscriminate rocket attacks on populated areas in Israel, and its calls for the eradication of Israel, but these, too, bear on the country’s reasons for fighting, not the means by which it fights. None of Hamas’s actions justifies Israeli violations of the laws of war. Assessing the extent of those violations is difficult while Israel’s military assault continues and the Israeli government limits the access of international journalists and human rights investigators to Gaza. Still, by talking to witnesses there, using satellite imagery, and analyzing photos and videos that Israeli soldiers and Palestinian civilians have posted on social media, it is possible to determine that the Israeli government has repeatedly violated international humanitarian law in ways that amount to war crimes.
Afirst principle of international humanitarian law is that civilians, as well as civilian structures that are not in active use for military purposes, should never be targeted and must be presumed civilian unless evidence suggests otherwise. Defenders of the Israeli government like to contrast its behavior with Hamas’s deliberate targeting of civilians on October 7, but the contrast is less stark than they would have us believe.
IMAGE DESCRIPTION: Tayseer Barakat: Conversation, 2015
This article was written by Kenneth Roth published by The New York Review of Books on July 18, 2024. You can also read it here The New York Review of Books.