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Under Rules of War, ‘Proportionality’ in Gaza Is Not About Evening the Score [1]
['Steven Erlanger']
Date: 2023-12-13
The international laws governing war are unfeeling. They give more precedence to military advantage than to civilian harm. They do not consider comparative numbers of dead or wounded. They ask commanders in the field to judge, often very quickly, the military advantage of an attack, the nature of the threat they face, what means they possess to counter it and what feasible measures they can take to reduce the expected damage to civilians and civilian infrastructure.
That complicated calculus, known as “proportionality,” is deeply flawed, lawyers say, because it balances essentially incompatible things. And each attack must be judged separately, to decide if it is within the boundaries of a legal act of war.
“The law of war is cold,” said Emanuela-Chiara Gillard, an associate fellow at Chatham House, the London think tank, who previously worked as a lawyer for the Red Cross and the United Nations. It does not, she added, “address our concerns and moral outrage over civilian death.”
After Hamas invaded Israel and killed some 1,200 people, Israel retaliated in force. But the televised images of devastation in Gaza and the large asymmetry in deaths, especially of civilians, have created an uproar in the Arab world and parts of the West.
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[1] Url:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/13/world/middleeast/israel-gaza-proportionality-law-of-war.html
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