Crimes of the Century
June 19, 2025 at 07:30PMIt has been more than 20 months since, in response to an unprecedented attack by Hamas, Israel began its relentless assault on Gaza. Here, Suzy Hansen makes the case that the world has witnessed more than rampant cruelty and carnage—it has witnessed the manipulation, the subversion, and ultimately the destruction of humanitarian law:
Though the evidence of war crimes may appear overwhelming, few experts believe Netanyahu or Gallant or their allies will ever be brought to justice by the ICC, not least because they will not surrender to the court. “People don’t fully grasp how permissive international humanitarian law is,” the legal scholar Samuel Moyn has said. “After all, it is a body of law that permits not only killing but intentional killing of civilians, at least in some number.” Israeli lawyers may argue civilian deaths are acceptable as long as they can prove necessity or that the deaths won them a significant military advantage.
“The expected military advantage here,” Eylon Levy, an Israeli-government spokesperson, told the BBC, “is to destroy the terror organization that perpetrated the deadliest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.” Yale Law School’s Oona Hathaway has pointed out that this is an unusual approach, since “by weighing any single instance of harm to civilians against a perceived existential threat, Israel can justify virtually any strike as meeting the requirements of proportionality; the purported benefits always outweigh any costs.” The Biden administration supported such arguments, claiming the point of the war in Gaza was to “prevent another October 7,” the same forever-war justification the Americans put forth during the “War on Terror.”
It is good legal cover. “The issue is not with the lack of evidence or weak cases,” Elayyan of Al-Haq told me. “Over the course of time, Israel has succeeded in convincing many people around the world of its propaganda. It has successfully manipulated international humanitarian law to justify its crimes, especially when it comes to principles such as military necessity, proportionality, and distinction.”
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/06/19/crimes-of-the-century/
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