Fight to the death: Israel, Hamas and international law

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RTÉ's Tony Connelly looks at how Israel is interpreting international law, and whether or not there is a road to peace

The car stopped dead at the junction of Yitzhak Sadeh and Yigal Alon Streets as we clambered out and over to a cluster of trees.

It was an unsettling episode, but nothing compared to the death and destruction that rain down on Gaza every day and night.The UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres says there is"something clearly wrong in the way that military operations are being done." Israelis are not just emotionally raw: there is a blanket consensus that the Israeli Defence Forces must eliminate Hamas because Israel’s very survival is at stake.

But even among thoughtful, liberal Israelis who sympathise with the Palestinian population, there is the unanimous belief that this is a just war and the IDF are conducting it according to international law."I have a very hard time watching the news. My heart does break for every Palestinian mother who is now terrified for her children.

This is not a claim that sits well with the daily images of pancaked buildings - whole neighbourhoods destroyed - and crushed bodies piling higher each day in Gaza. "Therefore, when people look at images from war they intuitively assume that something wrong has happened, and we very quickly, in the modern age, translate morality to war, so it’s got to be a war crime."

A fundamental rule of jus in bello is to distinguish between soldiers and civilians, and between military objectives and civilian objects . There are heavy qualifications - militaries cannot use indiscriminate force, or weapons whose destructive force are unlimited. In response to this asymmetric situation, Hamas has built a network of tunnels and a vast supply of rockets positioned, according to numerous reports, in civilian locations in order to leverage its threat against Israel.

The Gaza War of 2014 was triggered by the kidnapping and murder of three Israeli teenagers in the West Bank . "Now, they came to the fork in the road which Israel assumed they would get to," says Ziv Bohrer, of the Law Faculty at Bar-Ilan University. Israel therefore no longer sees Hamas as a force it can deter. In turn, the military establishment has upgraded its understanding of"proportionality" and"military advantage."

 

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