THOUGH world history is honeycombed with savageries of wars, today’s world is witnessing harrowing war crimes in Gaza. The magnitude of the plight of the Palestinian children is so excruciating for humanity in that more than 4000 children have been brutally killed while hundreds are injured. In the pretext of its engineered self-defence right, the Israeli Government and its security forces are committing genocide — an awful ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians via collective punishment—which, both morally and legally, is a crime against humanity, large protests against Israel across the globe endorse it.
Targeting innocent civilians, particularly children and women is highly questionable before those so called powerful players who claim to be the authors of a rule- based world order—an order that is being inhumanly tormented. Gaza has a population of 2.3 million people living in an area of 365sq km (140sq miles), which amounts to a population density of 6,300 people per square kilometre (16,320 people per square mile).Children make up 47 percent of Gaza’s population, according to UNICEF. More than 100 children have been killed every day since Israel started bombing the besieged Palestinian enclave on October 7. One child is killed every 15 minutes in the Israeli bombings of Gaza, according to a Palestinian NGO, highlighting the toll the current war has exacted on children.
According to the Guardian (November 4),’’ The number of children killed in nearly a month of fighting dwarfs the total recorded by the UN for years of conflict in Gaza before that. Between 2008, the first year UN statistics are available and September 2023, a total of 859 boys and girls were killed by airstrikes and fighting inside Gaza. Over the last 29 days, an average of 130 have been killed each day”. This severity of death of Gaza’s children is further endorsed by the UNICEF, “Gaza has become a graveyard for thousands of children. It’s a living hell for everyone else”.
Moreover, the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child expressed its outrage at the profound suffering of children: ‘’Armed conflict harms children first and foremost and has lifelong effects on their physical and mental health, their development and ultimately the enjoyment of all their rights. Children are also harmed when they survive but lose parents and other family members and friends and witness catastrophic events”. Gaza’s Alshifa hospital has been a giggling graveyard. ‘Children must never be killed or maimed. Killing or maiming children is a grave violation against children and perpetrators should be held to account for their actions”, a UK-based organization “Save the Children’’, said in a statement. What remains the irony of the current war savagery is Israel’s barbaric pursuit of collective punishment.
The Israeli barbarity of collective punishment: “Collective punishments are prohibited under international humanitarian law in all circumstances. The prohibition on collective punishments applies to criminal sanctions against persons for actions for which they do not bear individual criminal responsibility, but also to “all sanctions and harassment of any sort, administrative, by police action or otherwise.’’ Although customary international law does permit a very narrow category of belligerent reprisals in international armed conflicts, Israeli forces are doing every unlawful act of targeting all the prohibited sites. ‘’Reprisals and collective punishment violate international humanitarian law prohibitions against the mistreatment of civilians and captured combatants. Common article 3 to the Geneva Conventions prohibits in all circumstances acts including murder, mutilation, cruel, humiliating and degrading treatment and torture against civilians and other persons no longer taking part in the hostilities. Article 4 of Protocol II also sets out the fundamental guarantees of humane treatment, which explicitly includes a prohibition on collective punishments, acts of terrorism and pillage. Commentaries of the International Committee of the Red Cross on Protocol II and customary international law make clear that these articles leave no room for reprisals in non-international armed conflict’’.
Israel’s false notion of collateral damage: Customary international law in both form and substance — an abode of international humanitarian law — as interpreted by the vast majority — by no means gives Israel the “right to self-defence” against the Palestinians residing in the Occupied Palestinian Territories( OPT), the West Bank and Gaza Strip because Israel is an occupying state and its sovereignty laws are absolutely governed by international laws and conventions– related to occupation, such as the Fourth Geneva Convention. Whereas , Israel’s backers, particularly the US, the EU and the UK—all seek unilaterally to reinterpret the international texts, particularly Article 51 of the UN ‘s Charter-Chapter Vii — giving it more room for military action and less accountability.
Fairly arguing, the principle of proportionality is amorphous. Meeting it requires making predictions based on assessments and partial information and striking a applying this principle is not simply a matter of cold legal analysis but involves moral considerations as well. Any interpretation that reflects the spirit of international humanitarian law would be considered balance between virtually incomparable elements. In this backdrop, strategy and morality — not the Israeli contrived doctrine of double effect vis à-vis the self-defence — form the core determinants in international law. Thus, the western governments’ stance regarding Israel’s right to self-defence is legally erroneous and morally bankrupt.
’Decades of impunity and injustice and the unprecedented level of death and destruction of the current offensive will only result in further violence and instability in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories’’, said Agnès Callamard of Amnesty International. Meanwhile, in the wake of Israel’s glaring dual violations of international humanitarian law and international human rights law in Gaza, the recently held OIC Riyadh summit clearly rejected Israel’s unlawful right to self-defence and demanded an immediate cessation of the Israeli aggression against the Palestinians.
What Israel and its western partners must realize that Israel’s flawed immunity of war crimes puts a great question mark on their international conduct — paralyzing the whole edifice of international law while darkening the future of humanity. Arguably, have world leaders ever thought, what they are going to reply to their future generations when they will ask as to where they were when this despicable onslaught was going on in Gaza? Has such impotence outweighed the brutalities of Israel? The answers remain a mystery!
—The writer, an independent ‘IR’ researcher-cum-international law analyst based in Pakistan, is member of European Consortium for Political Research Standing Group on IR, Critical Peace & Conflict Studies, also a member of Washington Foreign Law Society and European Society of International Law. He deals with the strategic and nuclear issues.
Email: [email protected]
views expressed are writer’s own.
