The legality of a war effort under international law hinges on two primary criteria. The first concerns a military campaign’s ends: States are generally forbidden from using force against those beyond their borders for any purpose except self-defense. The second criteria concerns the war effort’s means. States may not deliberately target civilians nor disproportionately harm them in service of their war aims.
Israel’s campaign against Hamas meets that first criterion. The conflict between the Palestinians of Gaza and the Israeli government is not truly one between distinct states. Israel exercises effective sovereignty over Gaza, controlling the movement of its people, barring them from a portion of its territory, and regulating its import and export of goods. Nevertheless, when a militant group murders more than a thousand of a state’s people, that state has cause for war against the militant group.
But Israel’s means of war against Hamas runs afoul of international law. Israel has imposed a complete siege on Gaza, denying its 2 million inhabitants access to electricity, food, water, and fuel. Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant justified these measures on the grounds that “we are fighting human animals, and we act accordingly.”
Volker Turk, the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, told the New York Times Thursday that “the imposition of sieges that endanger the lives of civilians by depriving them of goods essential for their survival is prohibited under international humanitarian law.”
Tom Dannenbaum, an expert on siege law at Tufts University, affirmed this assessment, describing Israel’s policy as an abnormally clear-cut instance of starving civilians as a means of war, an unambiguous violation of human rights.
Israel’s aerial bombardment of Gaza also appears to flout international law’s prohibition of the disproportionate killing of civilians. The Israeli Air Force has dropped more than 6,000 bombs on a stretch of land roughly the size of Queens. Its targets have included hospitals and schools. By its own account, Israel has not been firing “warning strikes” to encourage civilians to exit a given building before incinerating it. As of this writing, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry, Israel’s airstrikes have killed more than 1,799 people, including 583 children. According to the ministry, 60 percent of all the injured are women or children.
On Friday, Israel ordered 1 million Gazans to evacuate the northern part of the strip, in advance of an Israeli ground invasion set to begin at around 8 p.m. local time. The United Nations has said that it considers such an evacuation logistically impossible. The number of people is too large, the transport infrastructure too damaged, and, thanks to the Israeli siege, the resources necessary to care for 1 million uprooted people are too scarce. In this context, the order looks like a means of excusing the reckless endangerment of the lives of any civilians who remain in place.
For its part, the Israeli government is doing little to counter the impression that it has contempt for the civilians in Gaza. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has promised retribution that will “reverberate for generations.” The Israeli general Ghassan Aliyan has declared, “You wanted hell — you will get hell.”
Israeli president Isaac Herzog, while allowing that Gazan civilians weren’t legitimate military targets, nevertheless suggested that they bear responsibility for Hamas’s actions, saying, “They could have risen up, they could have fought against the evil regime, which took over Gaza in a coup d’etat.”
The Israeli Air Force, meanwhile, proudly advertised its decimation of entire city blocks.
The U.S. government has done little to deter Israel from committing war crimes. It has declined to reject Israel’s evacuation order. “We’re going to be careful not to get into armchair-quarterbacking the tactics on the ground” of the Israel Defense Forces, National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said Friday. “What I can tell you is we understand what they’re trying to do. They’re trying to move civilians out of harm’s way and giving them fair warning.”
Meanwhile, the administration has forbidden State Department officials from releasing statements that call for “de-escalation/ceasefire,” an “end to violence/bloodshed,” or “restoring calm.” A White House spokesperson decried congressional progressives’ advocacy for a ceasefire as “repugnant” and “disgraceful.”
Late Friday, Fox News reported that the White House has encouraged Israel to delay its ground invasion until safe passage for Palestinian civilians out of northern Gaza can be secured. This is better than nothing. But it leaves Israel’s reckless siege and aerial bombardment campaign unchallenged.
This is a patent failure of moral leadership. The U.S. has the power to exert some influence over Israeli strategy. The primary cost of its acquiescence to Israeli war crimes will be the deaths of a grotesque number of innocent Gazans. A secondary cost will be a decline in America’s standing in the world in general and the Middle East in particular. It is not in America’s national interest to abet the mass killing of Palestinian civilians.
Indeed, it is not in Israel’s best interests for the United States to do so. As Hussein Ibish notes in The Atlantic, Hamas quite likely intended to provoke Israel into mounting a response that would earn it international condemnation and make it impossible for Saudi Arabia to pursue the normalization of relations.
Israel may prize the complete destruction of Hamas over its international reputation. But the idea that one can eliminate support for terrorist resistance within a community by incinerating thousands of its civilians is ludicrous. There is no military solution to Israel’s security problem short of ethnic cleansing or genocide. It may impair Hamas’s operative capacities through the targeted assassination of its leaders or by scaling back its illegal settlement project in the West Bank so as to free up soldiers to guard its border with Gaza. But Israel cannot extinguish the problem of Palestinian resistance through the commission of atrocities.
It is therefore not only a humanitarian imperative for Israel to exercise greater restraint, but also a geostrategic one. As Ibish writes,
Outrageous overreach by terrorists typically aims to provoke overreach. Washington and other friends of Israel who are now seized with sympathy should immediately caution Israel not to make this blunder. If Israel instead exercises restraint, however difficult doing so might be both politically and emotionally, it can thwart the goals of Hamas and its Iranian sponsors. Restraint would go a long way toward ensuring that the diplomatic opening with Saudi Arabia continues to move forward, dealing a major blow to local revisionist powers, such as Iran, and global ones, such as China and Russia, that wish to supplant a rules-based order with one based on “Might makes right.”
The United States has the power to deter the worst excesses of Israel’s present campaign. Exercising that power would be in the best interests of not only Gazans, but the U.S. and Israel. It was cycles of retributive violence that birthed our current nightmare. If we help Israel to perpetuate those cycles, then the arc of the region’s history will bend back toward hell.
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