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Israel has acted swiftly against Hamas. It has acted effectively. And yes, even brutally. But it has acted lawfully.

Article 27 of the Hague Conventions places important limitations on siege warfare, demanding belligerents take “all necessary steps … to spare as far as possible edifices devoted to religion, art, science, and charity, hospitals, and places where the sick and wounded are collected, provided they are not used at the same time for military purposes.”

In this respect, Article 27 also places requirements on the besieged, requiring them to identify such edifices, places and buildings “by some particular and visible signs, which should be previously notified to the assailants.”

Far and away from “protecting edifices devoted to religion, art, science, and charity, hospitals, and places where the sick and wounded are collected,” Hamas − described as the “the de facto governing body in the Gaza Strip since 2007” − is widely reputed to use civilians as human shields, placing legitimate military targets in and around residential and commercial centers as a way to either deter Hamas’ adversaries from attacking in the first place or to deflect blame if such an attack results in collateral damage. The use of human shields is a war crime. ...

But what about starvation as a method of warfare?  Article 54(1) of the 1977 Additional Protocol I, Article 14 of the 1977 Additional Protocol II, and Article 8(2)(b)(xxv) of the 1998 ICC Statute all prohibit starving civilians as a method of war. And, indeed, Israel is preventing the flow of food and water into Gaza, which is certainly affecting civilians therein.

However, a few distinctions are worth noting. First, Israel is not bound by any of these sources of law. But even if it were, context matters. Where some have construed the foregoing prohibitions on starvation as being all-encompassing − that is, prohibiting any and all starvation of civilians as a method of war, even incidental starvation − others, such as the United States, recognize that it is “permissible to seek to starve enemy forces into submission," even if that means incidentally starving civilians, as long as the incidental starvation is not “excessive in relation to the military advantage anticipated to be gained.”

To interpret the law to categorically outlaw even incidental civilian starvation would be to create an exception that swallows the rule, which “could well render siege impossible as it has historically been known,” as one scholar at the Lieber Institute put it.

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