Which side has the advantage – terrorists firing rockets behind human shields or armies trying to stop them?
Judging by how quickly the media and international organizations adopt a narrative of war crimes against the IDF, Hamas and other terrorists currently enjoy the upper hand. They hide behind civilians to attack Israel indiscriminately, and Israel suffers the blame when Palestinian civilians are killed in counter-terror operations.
Indeed, the Israeli army is currently awaiting the result of a war crimes investigation from the UN’s Human Rights Council, a procedure that has been dubbed “Goldstone II” in some circles, in reference to the Goldstone Report of 2009, which accused Israel or war crimes. (But which Goldstone himself “reconsidered” two years later.)
“Armies must carry out their duties without fear of war crimes accusations,” said Nitsana Darshan-Leitner, head of the Shurat HaDin organization, which held a conference this week in Jerusalem to examine how well the laws of war stand up to the demands of the modern battlefield. “The Geneva Conventions never envisioned the mass rocket campaigns of Hamas and Islamic Jihad.”
Darshan Leitner said the Towards a New Law of War conference was meant to start a discussion about whether the laws of war need to be updated. She said she planned to make it an annual event “until it is not longer needed.”
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Former IDF Chief of Staff Benny Gantz, who delivered the keynote address, said there were three wars with Hamas during his tenure at the head of the army. “Each campaign, we lost before we started, as far as the international community was concerned.”
The days of “the battlefield” – where fighting took place away from civilian areas – have effectively ended, he said. “We need to go back to when the laws of war were meant to limit the bad guys.”
Col. Richard Kemp, the former commander of British forces in Afghanistan, said the laws of engagement and proportionality should be widened to look at an army’s overall objective, rather than the narrow lens of a particular mission.
The current situation has become a strategic advantage for Hamas, he said, and the media was partly complicit in the situation.
The media, he said, places its emphasis on civilian deaths, not the use of human shields that endanger those civilians. Public discourse, he said, has to focus on the ones who use human shields.
“Hamas’s real objective to use human shields is not to protect its weapons,” he added. “It’s to get the human shields killed, to have Israel accused of killing civilians.”
Other speakers, including Professor Rachel Vanlandingham of Southwestern Law School, and Professor Geoffrey Corn of the South Texas College of Law, argued that the current laws of war were sufficient, even for today’s battle conditions.
Prof. Corn said the meaning of legal terms such as proportionality had become distorted from their original meaning, and needed to be restored, not changed. Prof. Vanlandingham warned that changes to the law could backfire, leading to more constraints on the battlefield, not less.
