Geneva Conventions

• “If you aim at the driver’s side, you will hit the driver full-on,” Chris Lincoln-Jones told the newspaper.
• It is also thought probable that they were launched from a Hermes drone, made by Elbit Systems – also an Israeli manufacturer.
• The letter, which the newspaper reports amounts to a legal opinion, says UK arms sales to Israel breach international law and must stop.
• One obvious way to do that is to stop selling them weapons.

Now many of the aid agencies operating in Gaza have suspended their activities. As Stavropoulou and Schiffling write here, the difficulty of getting aid to the population threatens to make the famine that is engulfing the Gaza Strip worse than it already is.

Read more:
More than 200 aid workers have been killed in Gaza, making famine more likely

UN resolution

• We spoke with John Strawson, an expert in Israeli politics at the University of East London, who kindly answered our questions about the politics of the situation, especially the US decision not to use its veto to block the resolution after decades of faithfully supporting successive Israeli governments in the security council.
• Expert Q&A

  Given that Netanyahu has indicated that Israel will not abide by security council resolution 2728 – and the US has said that it’s a non-binding resolution in any case – what does international law say about the enforceability of US resolutions?

• There appears no reason why resolution 2728 is not legally binding and, if push comes to shove, the security council could order that UN members “take such action by air, sea, or land forces as may be necessary to maintain or restore international peace and security”.

Starvation behind the ‘Iron Wall’

• According to the Hamas-run Gaza health ministry the total has now passed 33,000 people.
• Nnenna Awah, whose PhD research at Sheffield Hallam University is in optimising food supply chains, walks us through the different classifications of food insecurity.
• Kaplan says it is the embodiment of Israel’s “Iron Wall” ideology, developed even before statehood was declared in 1948.
• Kaplan says that Jabotinsky’s ideological heirs in Likud (including Netanyahu) have rejected more liberal Israeli compromise positions ever since.

• The numbers involved are just as despairing.
• The world’s major authority on food insecurity, the IPC Famine Review Committee, estimates that 90% of Gazans – some 2.08 million people – are facing acute food insecurity.
• Indeed, of the people facing imminent starvation in the world today, an estimated 95% are in Gaza.
• As an expert in Palestinian public health, I fear the situation may not have hit its nadir.

Putting Palestinians ‘on a diet’

• But food insecurity in Gaza and the mechanisms that enable it did not start with Israel’s response to the Oct. 7 attack.
• Multiple factors contributed to this food insecurity, not least the blockade of Gaza imposed by Israel and enabled by Egypt since 2007.
• Basic foodstuff was allowed, but because of delays at the border, it can spoil before it enters Gaza.

• By placing restrictions on food imports, Israel seems to be trying to put pressure on Hamas by making life difficult for the people in Gaza.
• In the words of one Israeli government adviser in 2006, “The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger.” To enable this, the Israeli government commissioned a 2008 study to work out exactly how many calories Palestinians would need to avoid malnutrition.
• The blockade also increased food insecurity by preventing meaningful development of an economy in Gaza.

Hampering self-sufficency

• Gaza’s fishermen are regularly shot at by Israeli gunboats if they venture farther in the Mediterranean Sea than Israel permits.
• Because the fish closer to the shore are smaller and less plentiful, the average income of a fisherman in Gaza has more than halved since 2017.
• By early December 2023, an estimated 22% of agricultural land had been destroyed, along with factories, farms, and water and sanitation facilities.

Starvation as weapon of war

• The use of starvation is strictly forbidden under the Geneva Conventions, a set of statutes that govern the laws of warfare.
• Human Rights Watch has already accused Israel of using starvation as a weapon of war, and as such it accuses the Israeli government of a war crime.
• Yet untangling what Israel’s intentions may be – whether it is using starvation as a weapon of war, to force mass displacement, or if, as it claims, it is simply a byproduct of war – does little for the people on the ground in Gaza.

Yara M. Asi does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

• Collaboration with the enemy is a common and often painful part of armed conflict.
• It is also an issue in which I have both a professional and personal interest.
• The war in Ukraine is, in many ways, a transparent conflict, with cellphone images, drone cameras and satellite imagery feeding a flow of data to social media platforms and news outlets.

Liberating powers

• In June 2022, Bucha was the first liberated city from which collaboration with Russians was reported.
• The problem of collaboration is especially thorny in Ukraine’s Donbass region, with its long history of Russian-Ukrainian cultural and linguistic interaction.
• Since the summer of 2022, the front has stalemated, with a little more than half the region under Russian control.

What to do with collaborators

• On March 3, 2022, the Ukrainian parliament amended the country’s criminal code with two new laws criminalizing any type of cooperation with an aggressor state.
• It also prohibits cooperation with an aggressor state, its occupation administrations and its armed forces or paramilitary forces.
• The changes to Ukraine’s criminal code reflected concern among Ukraine’s leaders that collaboration with Russia would give the invading forces both ideological and military advantages.
• Yet in the near-daily speeches made since then by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, I was unable to find any reference to the need to root out collaborators.

The rush to (in)justice

• Were they acting out of a survival instinct or did they really sympathize with the Russians?
• Liberation brings tremendous release, not only of newfound freedom but of temptations toward revenge against those who once supported the occupier.
• This could be one reason why societies that experience occupation followed by liberation are prone to vengeance-seeking and lawlessness.
• The Netherlands, even with its global reputation for upholding human rights and democratic values, was no exception to the rush to judgment of suspected collaborators after World War II.

The post-occupation challenge

• A similar rush to justice appears to be playing out in parts of liberated Ukraine.
• Journalist Joshua Yaffa, writing from liberated Izyum for The New Yorker, found a town in which hundreds had been questioned or detained on suspicion of collaboration with occupying Russians.

Families divided

• And the longer the Russian occupation goes on, the more those in the occupied areas will be pressured into everyday complicity.
• As with the Netherlands at the end of Nazi occupation, the search for collaborators in Ukraine will not only be made by police and partisans; it will happen within families coming to terms with the past.

Ronald Niezen does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

• More than a month after Hamas fighters killed 1,400 Israelis in a shock assault, bombs continue to fall on the Gaza Strip in reprisal Israeli attacks.
• “Proportionality” has a place in what is described as the “laws of war.” The Conversation turned to Robert Goldman, an expert on international humanitarian law at American University Washington College of Law, for guidance on some of the issues.

What are the ‘laws of war’?

• It also includes what is known as “customary law” – rules that are accepted by states a legally binding, but are not necessarily part of any formal treaty.
• It is important to understand that modern IHL is not concerned with the reasons for, or the legality of, going to war.

Can civilian structures ever be lawfully attacked?

• This is because they, unlike munitions factories and command and control centers, do not effectively contribute to military action.
• If enemy forces take up positions in these civilian structures, then they become military objectives and can be lawfully bombed if the raid would yield the attacking party a definite military advantage.

What exactly is the rule of proportionality?

• The rule of proportionality applies to all armed conflicts as part of customary IHL.
• As such, the rule does not apply to enemy combatants or civilians who are directly participating in hostilities.

• Such a determination requires a balancing of probabilities that take in foreseeable collateral civilian casualties and the relative importance of a particular military target.
• In addition, planners of a particular attack must choose a weapon that ideally will avoid or minimize likely civilian collateral damage.
• As such, the rule or proportionality requires the attacking party to place high priority on the timely collection and evaluation of target intelligence.

Is the rule of proportionality being observed in Gaza?

• That analysis should be based on timely, reliable and constantly updated target intelligence.
• Israeli military spokesmen have stated repeatedly that they are taking all feasible measures to avoid excessive collateral damage in their bombing campaign.
• Part of this article appeared in an earlier article published by The Conversation on Oct. 15, 2023.

Robert Goldman does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.