The International Criminal Court should investigate Israel’s hostage rescue raid
Palestinians walk past debris a day after an operation by the Israeli Special Forces in the Nuseirat camp, 9 June 2024
Kenneth Roth writes in The Guardian on 13 June 2024:
The enormous loss of Palestinian life attendant to the Israeli military’s 8 June rescue of four hostages held by Hamas cries out for investigation. Hamas’s abduction and detention of these four civilians was a clear war crime, but that does not exempt the Israeli military from the duty to comply with international humanitarian law in the rescue operation. The available evidence suggests that Israel fell short in several deadly respects.
The Gaza health ministry, whose numbers have generally proved reliable, says that at least 274 Palestinians were killed in the operation and more than 600 wounded. The ministry does not distinguish combatants from civilians, but it reports that the dead included 64 children and 57 women, or 44% of the total. Given that many of the men who were killed in the course of the operation were in a nearby market, we must assume that a good proportion of them were civilians as well. That is a horrible civilian toll.
International humanitarian law requires that a military refrain from launching an assault if the anticipated civilian toll “would be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated”. It is reasonable to conclude that the Israeli operation fell short of this standard.
All the more so given questions about its necessity. With the rescue of these four hostages, Israeli military operations have freed a total of seven hostages alive. By contrast, more than 100 hostages were released as a result of Israel’s November 2023 ceasefire deal with Hamas. Few doubt that another deal will be necessary to bring most of the remaining hostages home alive. The negotiations have been painfully slow, in part because the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, seems to prioritize his elusive goal of destroying Hamas over the freeing of the hostages.
Israel notes that Hamas endangered civilians by holding the hostages in a densely populated neighborhood in Nuseirat in central Gaza. International humanitarian law requires militaries to take “all feasible precautions” to spare civilians, which Hamas violated by holding the hostages in two apartment buildings in Nuseirat, but that does not relieve Israel of the separate duty to avoid an attack that causes disproportionate harm to civilians. Palestinian civilians do not stop being civilians just because they are endangered by Hamas.