On October 7, 2023, Palestinian armed groups, chiefly Hamas’s armed wing, breached the fence around the Gaza strip and launched attacks on Israeli territory. Over several hours, Palestinian fighters killed 1,269 people, mostly civilians, engaged in sexual violence and torture, and took 253 hostages. The same day, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared, “Israel is at war,” and the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) launched air strikes and later a ground invasion of Gaza. In the eleven months since, Palestinian groups have continued to hold, mistreat, and kill hostages and launched rockets into Israel’s population centers. Meanwhile, the IDF has killed an estimated forty-one thousand people in Gaza, mostly civilians, engaged in sexual violence and torture of Palestinian detainees, damaged or destroyed most of the food, water, and medical infrastructure, and restricted humanitarian access, with dire consequences. Civilian casualty experts argue the death toll (which excludes the likely greater number killed “indirectly” through disease and deprivation) far exceeds what we have come to expect from contemporary military campaigns. Both sides have committed violations of International Humanitarian Law (IHL), too many to list individually.
The prevalence of violations is not unique to this conflict. What is unusual in Gaza is that catastrophic civilian harm coincides with more than a perfunctory claim of legal compliance: Israeli officials consistently and often proactively argue that their military operations adhere to international law, with support from some legal experts. This has put the spotlight on international law. Three proceedings before the International Court of Justice (ICJ)—South Africa’s allegation that Israel is engaged in genocide, Nicaragua’s allegation that Germany is complicit in Israel’s alleged violations of international law, and an Advisory Opinion affirming the illegality of Israel’s continued occupation—as well as the International Criminal Court (ICC) prosecutor’s request for arrest warrants against Hamas and Israeli leaders garner unprecedented public interest. These discursive and judicial processes could repair and solidify international law’s role as the yardstick for normative evaluation of war, including vis-à-vis powerful Western states. Or they could reveal IHL’s incapacity to meaningfully restrain war, catalyzing legal deterioration.
Prof Janina Dill is the Dame Louise Richardson Chair in Global Security at the Blavatnik School of Government. She is a Fellow at Trinity College and Co-Director of the Oxford Institute for Ethics, Law, and Armed Conflict (ELAC). Janina’s research concerns the role of law and morality in international relations, specifically in war. In one strand of research, she develops legal and philosophical theories about how international law can be an instrument of morality in war, albeit an imperfect one. This work speaks to debates in just war theory and international law. Another strand of Janina’s research seeks to explain how moral and legal norms affect the reality of war. She contributes to debates about the capacity of international law to constrain military decision-making. She also studies how normative considerations can shape public opinion on the use of force and the attitudes of conflict-affected populations, for instance, in Afghanistan, Ukraine and Iraq.
