Hamas’ deadly attack on Israel on October 7 shocked the entire planet. The ignominy, barbarity and savagery of the acts committed, such as the immolation of massacred babies, the rape of women, the killing of entire families or the cold-blooded shooting of young participants in a rave caused widespread retching.
Since then, Israel has continued military operations to neutralize the perpetual threat that Hamas represents not only for its citizens, but also for those of Gaza, hostages of this group which commits the worst atrocities of humankind.
The State of Israel only asserts its legitimate right to defend itself and attempts to stop the rain of rockets which continues to be launched against the Israeli populations.
Israel’s counterattack has raised many questions regarding international law.
Fundamentally, Israel has the right to defend itself. In the absence of a Palestinian state, Hamas is the entity that controls Gaza. As there is a state failure to intervene against armed groups — in fact, the terrorist group responsible for the attack against Israel is Hamas, the only group that exercises real authority over Gaza at the moment — Israel finds itself in the situation of acting in self-defense against Hamas. In addition to the right to self-defense codified and provided for in Article 51 of the United Nations Charter, there is also a customary version of this right. From this customary practice three criteria emerge for the use of force in a case of self-defense to be legal: the self-defense action must be immediate, necessary and proportional to an armed attack.
Since October 7, Israeli citizens have lived in continuous terror of sirens warning them to take shelter. And why ? Because the Hamas attack has not stopped since October 7. Hamas continuously bombards Israeli towns and villages with rockets from Gaza. This is an untenable situation.
Principle of proportionality
In the means used by Israel in its defensive action against these attacks of an unprecedented scale by Hamas armed groups, the supposed disproportionality of the response is the accusation most often launched against the Jewish State.
The principle of proportionality prohibits “launching attacks which may be expected to cause incidental loss of life among the civilian population, injury to civilians, damage to civilian objects, or a combination of these losses and damage, which would be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage expected.
International humanitarian law seeks to limit the worst effects of armed conflict in order to protect civilians. Although tragic, the loss of human life remains a reality of armed struggles. But they must be to the extent strictly necessary — for example, unwanted and, yes, tragic but unavoidable loss of civilian life when a highly strategic military target is targeted.
Thus, proportionality does not require that the damage caused to legitimate military targets be the same on both sides. It simply requires that the harm caused to civilians is not excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage expected from an action.
Israel’s military objective of eliminating Hamas is clearly legitimate. Each action taken in this direction must measure the losses and its impact for this purpose.
This reality does not immunize Israel from doing everything in its power to minimize losses; he must continue to do everything to minimize civilian losses [[le ministère de la Santé de Gaza — contrôlé par le Hamas — comptait plus de 8500 morts le 31 octobre] while knowing that Hamas has the inhumane practice of using Palestinian civilians as human shields — which is a war crime — to target Israeli civilians — which is also a war crime.
Israeli victims since the October 7 massacre number in the thousands: 1,400 people murdered, more than 200 hostages in the hands of Hamas, including 30 children. In fact, not since the end of the Holocaust have we seen such a massacre of Jews in a single day.
Israel not only has the right to defend itself, it is in fact its first responsibility as a state. Pleading a false interpretation of international law to deprive it of it must be strongly denounced.