Law and Humanity Buried in the Gaza Rubble

Israel, which has been oppressing the people of the region, especially Muslims, since its establishment in the Palestinian territories, acts almost like a terrorist organization. As a recent development, since October 7, 2023, Israel has carried out many attacks on Gaza, killing or injuring thousands of innocent people living in Gaza. These attacks violate the rules of International Law, the Law of War and International Criminal Law, the International Criminal Court decisions, the Geneva and Hague Conventions, the UN Convention on Conventional Weapons, Human Rights Watch reports and the conscience of humanity. In Gaza, Israel has bombed babies, children, women, unarmed civilians, journalists, hospitals, schools, civilian housing, mosques and churches, refugee camps, ambulances, convoys of the wounded, cultural heritage, used phosphorus bombs, mistreated prisoners, starved and dehydrated the civilian population, imposed an embargo on energy and other basic necessities, forced the displacement of up to two million people and implemented a policy of mass extermination of the population. All of these are not only war crimes, but also crimes against humanity. In the face of Israel's series of massacres and unlawful actions since its establishment, many countries, especially the United States, have provided unconditional military and political support to the Israeli government. The US provides Israel with $3.8 billion in annual military aid and vetoes UN Security Council resolutions against Israel. In addition to the US, countries such as France, Germany, the UK, Canada and the UK are trying to legitimize Israel's attacks and refuse to lift the embargo on Gaza. Moreover, these countries do not prevent Israeli settlement activities in the occupied territories and do not put pressure on Israel to comply with international law. By supporting Israel's war crimes, these countries are complicit in crimes against humanity. In the face of all the dramas and atrocities taking place in Gaza, academics, human rights defenders, artists, athletes, journalists, opinion leaders, clergy, judges and prosecutors from universities around the world are calling on the international community to take action. They demand an immediate halt to the suffering in Gaza, accountability for those responsible, the protection of the right to life and freedom of the people of Gaza, the lifting of the embargo on Gaza, the reconstruction of Gaza and an independent state for the Palestinian people. These demands are declared as a historical, conscientious, moral and civilized duty. The main purpose and problem of this article is the prosecution of Israel,

The International Criminal Court (ICC), seated in The Hague in the Netherlands, was established by virtue of the 1998 Rome Statute and began functioning in 2002. Its purpose is to prosecute individuals suspected of having committed war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide, and in the future, crimes of aggression. Despite its initial support for the idea of the court, Israel harbored concerns that the ICC would serve as an instrument of lawfare that could be used against it. Thus, when an article was inserted into the Rome Statute defining the transfer of the population of an occupying nation to occupied territory even in the absence of force as a war crime, and thus liable to incriminate Israelis settling in the West Bank, Israel decided not to ratify the statute or become a member of the ICC. But when legal warfare is just as important as war on the physical battlefield, it is critical to know the rulebook even if one refuses to be a player. It is therefore important to be familiar with the ICC and its activities and understand its potential as a key element in the realm of legal warfare between Israel and the Palestinian Authority.

International Journal of Business Analytics (IJBAN), 2024

The stimulus to carry out this research is to analyze the breach of International Criminal Law by the Israeli military and political establishments amid the ongoing Israel-Hamas conflict. The conflict between Israel and Hamas in Gaza has led to allegations of war crimes and breaches of International Criminal Law. The International Criminal Court (ICC) has jurisdiction over analyzing clauses of International Criminal Law and conflict-related stressors, this study emphasizes the crucial need for global engagement to refrain Israel from mitigating these violations of International Criminal Law. The findings of this study can assist social policymakers and international community leaders in highlighting this issue and calling for targeted strategies to abstain Israeli authorities from breaching International Criminal Law.

Middle East Research and Information Project, 2023

In less than one month, Israel has dropped more than 25,000 tons of explosives on Gaza, demolishing the urban landscape and killing over 10,000 Palestinians. Given the sheer scale of violence and its leveling of homes, hospitals, schools and the civilians in them, the laws of war (also known as International Humanitarian Law, IHL) have become a renewed source of debate and scrutiny—most recently following the bombing of the Jabalia refugee camp on October 31, in which Israeli airstrikes killed at least 50 people in an attack that was allegedly targeting a single Hamas commander. Writing in these pages in 2016, Lisa Hajjar noted Israel’s role as innovator when it comes to pushing the limits of international humanitarian law and challenging the law’s protections of civilians (the article, from MER issue 279, is worth reading in full). At the time, Hajjar speculated that Israel’s new interpretations might alter legal norms, mainstreaming extreme state violence. The piece is important for moving beyond the question of whether violence is legal to underscore the unevenness of humanitarian law as powerful states maneuver within it. To discuss these and other facets of the law as it is being mobilized in Israel’s ongoing campaign on Gaza, MERIP’s managing editor, Marya Hannun, spoke to Neve Gordon, professor of international law and human rights at Queen Mary University in London and co-author (with Nicola Perugini) of Human Shields: A History of People in the Line of Fire (University of California Press, 2020). Their conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Questions of International Law, 2017

Despite the burgeoning literature on the consequences in international law of Israeli practices and policies in the territories it occupies, there has been only limited legal consideration of the intentions that drive Israel’s practices and the structures and processes that underpin them. This essay assesses Israel’s administration of justice in the occupied Palestinian territory in light of Hart’s category of the pathology of legal systems, which offers a normative perspective on the ends and means of a state’s relationship to international law. The essay examines the posture of Israel’s legal system towards international law to provide a distinct normative perspective on the thick background rules of Israel’s internationally unlawful acts. It analyses the presumptions underlying the operation of its administration of justice in the occupied territory, and explores how the systemic denial of Palestinians rights is based on the rejection of Palestinian sovereignty over the territory Israel occupies. The essay’s review of Israeli practices as manifestations of a legal pathology concludes with reflections on the utility of this analytical category, particularly for the determination of the nature of state responsibility in international law.

2012

The IDF struck hundreds of terrorists and destroyed hundreds of smuggling tunnels, weapons-manufacturing sites, and storage facilities in a well-coordinated aerial and ground campaign. In three weeks of fighting (until January 18, 2009), 13 Israelis died (three civilians and ten soldiers-four of whom were killed by "friendly" fire). An examination carried out by IDF Military Intelligence found that of the 1,166 Palestinians who were killed, 709 belonged to terrorist organizations. Some 295 non-combatant civilians were killed. The identity and degree of involvement of the remaining 162 Palestinians (all of them male) remained unclear. Of the 709 armed Palestinians killed during the operation, 609 were Hamas terrorist operatives and operatives belonging to its security forces.(2) During the operation, the IDF made unprecedented efforts to avoid civilian casualties in Gaza, including making over 300,000 phone calls to residents, urging them to leave the area before the IDF struck nearby Hamas targets. "This was not a war against the Palestinians," a senior IDF officer explained. "It was an operation of self-defense against Hamas and related terror organizations. Unfortunately, this task was made extremely difficult by Hamas, as they made the choice to use civilians as human shields. Thus, protecting civilians was almost impossible, but I am proud of the way that we did it-our own forces took safety risks in order to protect Palestinians."(3) Five months after the Gaza war ended, on June 18, 2009, the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs and the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung convened an international conference in Jerusalem on "Hamas, the Gaza War, and Accountability under International Law," where leading experts examined how international law, which was mainly formulated for interstate conflicts, applies to conflicts involving nonstate actors like Hamas. Participants were aware that the law is often used to delegitimize Israel and its self-defense actions. Many support Israel's right to selfdefense until the moment when Israel exerts that right. Dr. Roy S. Schondorf of the Israel Ministry of Justice begins with a discussion of "International Law's Limitations on Contending with Terror," noting that at the time the major conventions regulating the laws of war were drafted-the Hague Conventions of 1907 and the Geneva Conventions of 1949-the phenomenon of a conflict between a state and a terrorist organization outside its boundaries was almost nonexistent and these conventions did not pretend to regulate this issue. Nevertheless, international law recognizes that under certain circumstances the state can operate outside its territory against a terror organization and is entitled to harm the fighters of that organization and its military targets.

2018

Those involved in mobilizing international law to achieve justice for the Palestinians have invoked numerous legal and governance institutions, at both international and national levels. For various reasons, international law has understandably been regarded with a high level of skepticism by many Palestinians, particularly from legitimacy and effectiveness standpoints. However, law has also ignited the Palestinian civic imagination and has led to bold and creative initiatives, including efforts to hold both states and (corporate) non-state actors accountable through legal and other means, and even to construct alternative models for nation building. This introduction to a Special Issue of the Global Jurist on ‘International Law and the State of Israel’ emerges from an international conference that took place at Cork City Hall and at the campus of University College Cork in Ireland in March 2017. Our message for producing this Special Issue and indeed for our colleagues who organized the conference in the first place was simple: while we cannot afford to neglect law in envisioning alternative futures in Israel/Palestine (including statehood), justice always remains a guide.

This BADIL working paper will constitute the first of a new BADIL series looking into the subject of International Criminal Law.

Social Science Research Network, 2013

Commonly law is seen as an alternative to violence, although it relies on violence or its threat for enforcement. Through a study of Israel's campaign to transform international humanitarian law (IHL) by systematically violating it, this essay considers the possibility that violence precedes and even creates law. Israel has a long history of ad hoc ''legal entrepreneurialism,'' but its current effort, launched during the second intifada, is institutionalized, persistent, and internally coherent. The essay reviews the specific legal innovations Israel has sought to establish, all of which expand the scope of ''legitimate'' violence and its targets, contrary to IHL's fundamental purposes of limiting violence and protecting non-combatants from it. WHAT IS THE RELATIONSHIP between law and violence? Students of the role of law in society have pondered this question for decades. Prominent Yale legal scholar Robert Cover began a widely-read law review article a number of years ago with the striking introduction: ''Legal interpretation takes place in a field of pain and death.. .. Legal interpretive acts signal and occasion the imposition of violence upon others: A judge articulates her understanding of a text, and as a result, somebody loses his freedom, his property, his children, even his life.'' The article, entitled ''Violence and the Word,'' spurred renewed inquiry into the relationship between law, language, and violence, and underscored law's ultimate, though not always visible, reliance on force. 1 A later volume, inspired by Cover, was entitled ''Law's Violence,'' and expanded on this theme, considering the question of how violence done by and in the name of the law differs from illegal or extralegal violence-or, indeed, if they differ at all. 2 The relationship between law and violence has also figured prominently in anthropological definitions of law. According to E. Adamson Hoebel, an early and influential legal anthropologist, law was defined by the threat or GEORGE E. BISHARAT is a professor at UC Hastings College of the Law. The author would like to thank Rose Mishaan for her highly capable research assistance. Thanks are also due to Laura Nader, Mai Taha, and the Interdisciplinary Group at

Hastings International and Comparative Law Review, 2005