A question of intent

New Statesman​

16-07-2025

'Operation 'Gideon's Chariots', Israel's latest assault on Gaza, began on the night of 16 May 2025. Sometimes the names of military operations carry a message. Gideon was the biblical liberator of Israel from its oppressors, who led a small force of 300 men to defeat the mighty host of the Midianites. 'Gideon's Chariots' expresses the traditional narrative that Israel is the underdog fighting for survival.
It is a myth. Israel is one of the most highly militarised and technically advanced states in the world. In terms of GDP per head it is also one of the richest. It is an undeclared nuclear power. At $37bn, its defence budget is by far the biggest in the Middle East, after Saudi Arabia's. Its security is implicitly guaranteed by the United States, which contributes over $3bn a year to its defence. By comparison, Gaza was one of the world's poorest territories even before the destruction recently visited upon it. It has no armed forces apart from Hamas terrorists and a handful of other local militias. It is virtually defenceless against tanks and aircraft. Israel is in a position to do whatever it likes to Gaza, and it does. Hamas's professed ambition may be to eliminate the state of Israel, but it has no more chance of achieving it than a gnat has of killing an elephant.
Israel once enjoyed a great deal of moral capital. The Holocaust and the long Jewish experience of persecution aroused sympathy across the West. The idealism surrounding the foundation of the Israeli state and the remarkable social, intellectual and economic achievements of Israel since then were rightly admired. This soft power was politically valuable to Israel. It masked the historic injustice inflicted on the indigenous population of Palestine at the foundation of Israel, when they were cleared out in order to make way for a Jewish state.
That moral capital has now been largely dissipated. International hostility to Israel is particularly strong among the world's young, who will dominate its international outlook in the next generation. Anti-Semitism exists, but it is not the main reason for this significant shift of opinion. It has happened because of the way in which Israel has chosen to deploy its overwhelming strength against the vulnerable population of Gaza. This has already provoked the issue of arrest warrants against Benjamin Netanyahu and the former defence minister Yoav Gallant by the International Criminal Court, which is a serious and impartial court whatever the US government may say. Serious criticisms have been made of Israel's conduct in Gaza by the United Nations, and countries such as Britain, France, South Africa, Australia and Canada. Many countries have imposed total or partial arms embargoes.
There is a strong case that Israel is guilty of war crimes. As a matter of international law, Israel has a right to defend itself, but the methods which it uses are circumscribed by treaty. Israel has signed up to the Geneva Conventions of 1949. The Fourth Convention contains extensive protections for civilian populations caught in a war zone. It forbids attacks on hospitals in any circumstances, unless the hospitals
are themselves being used to commit acts of war (articles 18 and 19). It forbids the destruction of private property except where this is 'rendered absolutely necessary by military operations' (article 53). As an occupying power in relation to most of Gaza, Israel is bound to ensure that food and medical supplies are provided to the population (article 55). The permanent displacement of the population is strictly forbidden (article 49).
These provisions have been supplemented by a substantial body of binding customary law. International humanitarian law, the generic name given to this body of law, has been codified by the International Committee of the Red Cross in a way that is generally regarded as impartial and authoritative. Military operations must not be directed against civilian targets. This includes towns, cities and villages, residential areas and specific installations such as hospitals, water processing facilities, power plants and other facilities essential to the survival of the civilian population. Indiscriminate attacks are forbidden, including area bombardment and the use of weapons whose effects are uncontrollable. Starvation is specifically banned as a method of warfare. All forms of ethnic cleansing are ruled out.
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Of all the rules of international humanitarian law the most important is the rule which requires proportionality in warfare. The International Committee of the Red Cross expresses it as follows:
'Launching an attack which may be expected to cause incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians, damage to civilian objects, or a combination thereof, which would be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated, is prohibited.'
This means that some military operations are unacceptable although they may have an important military purpose and bring real military advantages, because the civilian casualties would simply be too high.
It is easy to dismiss these principles as the dreams of unworldly professors and the misplaced idealism of lawyers. But that would be a serious mistake. They are included in the military manuals of most civilised states, including Israel's. They are based on a realistic assessment that war is unavoidable but can be at least partly humanised. This is a major achievement of our world and marks a significant advance in the regulation of warfare, drawing on the catastrophic experiences of the Second World War. We cannot really want to return to the barbarism of the area bombing of cities, the indiscriminate slaughter of civilians, the deliberate mass starvation of populations and the vast forced population transfers which characterised that conflict. We cannot without hypocrisy criticise the wholesale violation of civilised standards by Russia in Ukraine, and tacitly endorse them when practised by Israel in Gaza.
At the outset, the declared object of Israeli military operations in Gaza was to destroy Hamas. The problem with this has always been that although much of the leadership of Hamas and some of its installations are identifiable, Hamas is not an organised and disciplined combatant force like a uniformed army. It is a paramilitary movement dispersed among the civilian population like needles in a haystack. It can be destroyed, if at all, only by burning the entire haystack. Yet every sprig of straw in the haystack is a human life. The destruction of Hamas is probably unachievable by any amount of violence, but it is certainly unachievable without a grossly disproportionate effect on human life.
Hamas's attacks on 7 October 2023 killed 1,195 people. According to the Gaza health authorities (part of the Hamas administration) 57,645 Palestinians have so far been killed in Israeli military operations. In addition, over 180 journalists are reported to have died and over 224 humanitarian aid workers, 179 of them employees of the United Nations' relief organisation UNWRA, which Israel will no longer allow to operate in Gaza. These figures do not include indirect casualties from preventable disease and malnutrition caused by war. Most of the victims have been identified by name. A proportion of them are no doubt Hamas fighters. Assessments are necessarily conjectural, but plausible estimates suggest that Hamas may account for 20 per cent of the casualties. United Nations agencies estimate that about 70 per cent have been women and children. The casualties include those caused by grotesque acts of violence such as the bombing of hospitals full of patients, many of whom cannot be moved, because there are said to be Hamas command centres underneath them; or the destruction by bombing of entire apartment blocks whose residents are said to include some Hamas operatives. As of January 2025, more than nine-tenths of residential buildings in Gaza had been destroyed or badly damaged. These figures may be criticised at the margins, but they have been verified by reputable academic studies and responsible agencies of the United Nations. They are not just propaganda or figments of anti-Semitic imaginations.
The total blockade of Gaza announced by Netanyahu on 2 March 2025 began to cause famine within a fortnight. It was thought likely to lead ultimately to the most extreme case of man-made famine since the Second World War. The defence minister, Israel Katz, explained in April 2025:
'Israel's policy is clear: no humanitarian aid will enter Gaza and blocking this aid is one of the main pressure levers preventing Hamas from using it as a tool with the population.'
It would be hard to imagine a clearer statement that starvation was being used as a weapon of war. In May, Israel qualified the policy by setting up a system of food distribution from militarised 'hubs' organised by its own tame organisation, the so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. That system has largely broken down and was never capable of feeding more than part of the population. Meanwhile, the United Nations Human Rights Agency has recorded nearly 800 Palestinians killed while gathering at distribution hubs, hoping for food. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz recently reported, on the basis of interviews with soldiers, that this has been done on the express orders of senior officers of the Israel Defence Forces.
I have no ideological position on this conflict. I approach it simply as lawyer and a historian. But I sometimes wonder what Israel's defenders would regard as unacceptable, if the current level of Israeli violence in Gaza is not enough. It is impossible for any decent person to be unmoved by the scale of arbitrarily imposed human suffering, or the spectacle of a powerful army brutally assaulting a population already on its knees. This is not self-defence. It is not even the kind of collateral damage which can be unavoidable in war. It is collective punishment, in other words revenge, visited not just on Hamas but on an entire population. It is, in short, a war crime.
Is it also genocide? That is a more difficult question. Genocide is defined by the Genocide Convention of 1951 (to which Israel is party) as acting with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, by killing its members, causing them serious bodily or mental harm or deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction in whole or in part. Because genocide depends on intent, there will always be room for argument about whether it is happening.
Recently, a new war aim has emerged alongside the original plan to destroy Hamas. This is nothing less than the wholesale displacement of the population of Gaza to third countries. The Israeli minister of national security, Itamar Ben-Gvir, is a long-standing advocate of ethnic cleansing. The finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, is another. He announced at a public press conference on 6 May 2025, shortly after the decision to launch Operation Gideon's Chariots, that 'Gaza will be entirely destroyed.' He went on to explain that Palestinians would be herded into a Hamas-free zone, and from there would leave 'in great numbers' to third countries.
These two men were recently sanctioned by Britain and four other countries 'in their personal capacity'. But they were not speaking in their personal capacity, and cannot so easily be distinguished from the rest of the Israeli government. Both of them are leaders of minor far-right parties in the Knesset belonging to Netanyahu's coalition. They have the rest of the cabinet over a barrel, because Netanyahu's coalition government has a small majority, and without their support it will fall. So the government cannot afford to depart too far from their policy positions. A week after Smotrich's remarks, Netanyahu, giving evidence to a Knesset committee, reported that Israel was destroying more and more housing so that the population would have nowhere to return to and would have to leave Gaza. More recently, on 7 July, the defence minister, Israel Katz, briefed Israeli media that it was proposed to incarcerate Palestinians in a vast camp to be built on the ruins of Rafah, pending their departure for other countries.
Statements like these from the prime minister and senior ministers in his cabinet have to be considered together with the sheer scale of the human casualties and the indiscriminate physical destruction inflicted on their orders. The most plausible explanation of current Israeli policy is that its object is to induce Palestinians as an ethnic group to leave the Gaza Strip for other countries by bombing, shooting and starving them if they remain.
A court would be likely to regard that as genocide. One of the main barriers to clear thinking about Gaza is the fact that debate is muffled by two dangerous falsehoods. One is the idea that this story began with the Hamas attack of 7 October 2023; the other is that any attack on Israel's treatment of the Palestinians is anti-Semitic. A fortnight after the attack, António Guterres, the secretary-general of the United Nations, pointed out in the Security Council that it 'did not happen in a vacuum'. It followed 56 years in which the Palestinians in Gaza had suffered 'suffocating occupation… their land steadily devoured by settlements and plagued by violence, their economy stifled, their people displaced and their homes demolished.' He was expressing the self-evident truth that if you persistently treat people like that, hatred, violence and terrorism will eventually be the response. The Israeli ambassador objected to his attempt to 'understand' terrorism and demanded his resignation on the ground that his words were an anti-Semitic blood libel. This neatly encapsulated both falsehoods.
The tragedy is that what Israel is doing in Gaza is not even in its own interest, although it may be in the personal interest of Netanyahu if it helps him to stay in power. Hamas is, among other things, an idea. It is an idea which will not disappear and which Israel will have to live with, for it will never have peace until it learns to recognise and accommodate the natural attachment of Palestinians as well as Israelis to their land. That will involve considerable concessions by Israel, but the alternative will be worse.
The Hamas attack on Israel in October 2023 was unforgivable, and it is sometimes said that to understand it is tantamount to justifying it. 'Tout comprendre, c'est tout pardonner,' says Princess Bolkonsky in War and Peace. I would put it the other way round. That which we cannot forgive, we have a duty to understand. Otherwise we will get more of it.
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