While discussions continue about a ceasefire in the Gaza Strip and the death toll rises, an international humanitarian expert argued that the political-military choices of the Israeli government and its allies deconstruct the Western myth of universal humanitarian action.
After more than a year of conflict in the Gaza Strip, all the will and logic mobilized over the past 170 years to build international humanitarian law (IHL) are still being swept aside by one of the belligerents. The sordid massacre of civilians perpetrated in Israel on October 7, 2023, would, according to them, give the country’s leaders carte blanche to disregard all the political and legal landmarks painstakingly and rigorously built in the contemporary history of wars and humanitarian protections.
The key data resulting for the Gaza population are well known: over 40,000 civilian deaths—women and children included—a mortality rate never seen among humanitarian workers, destroyed healthcare facilities, famine, epidemics…
Distinction between combatants and civilians
The Battle of Solferino in 1859 serves as a historical landmark for interventions initially conceived as acts of relief that recall the irreducible humanity of every human being, including combatants, once they are injured, prisoners, or shipwrecked. Thus, they are no longer in a state of belligerence. Over the course of history and new conflicts, an evolving body of law was constructed. The four Geneva Conventions (updated in 1949) and their additional protocols (1977), developed and supported by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), form a primary reference to “international treaties that set essential rules to limit the barbarity of war.” The conventions affirm the necessary protection that must be afforded to civilians, healthcare personnel, and humanitarian workers.
Thus, the construction of law has always been concerned with adapting or anticipating new realities of weapons and conflicts. In particular, it sought to account for the changes concerning the primary victims of confrontations. For deaths and injuries are no longer, as in Solferino, soldiers from “regular” armies of countries engaged in “conventional” wars, but now, largely, civilians caught up in conflicts deemed non-international, where fighters from armed opposition groups operate. This shift in the nature of the belligerents adds complexity to the application of a crucial principle: the distinction between combatants and civilians.
The variable application of law
The initial foundations of IHL were largely built after conflicts that, before the emergence of post-colonial states, primarily involved Western countries: during the wars between European countries in the 19th century and later during the two World Wars. In the wake of World War II, the International Convention of July 28, 1951, was developed to clarify the rights and grounds for fleeing one’s country to seek refuge in a third country for individuals “who fear, with reason, being persecuted because of (their) race, (their) religion, (their) nationality, or (their) membership in a particular social group.”
The Gaza Strip is fully and hermetically sealed. A logic of collective punishment equates all civilians with supporters of Hamas: no rule of war seems to prevail anymore. We must all—humanitarian actors as well as political and military decision-makers—fully grasp the heavy global consequences of what is happening today and tomorrow in the Middle East and beyond. The ongoing tragedy in Gaza confronts the world with our collective inability to defend the fate of populations equitably, depending on where they live, the variable compassion of states in the face of the suffering of “the other,” the double standard in the application of international humanitarian law that follows, the openly displayed military and political complicities in an asymmetrical conflict of madness, and finally, our blindness to the rise of a “Global South” that is taking shape in resentment and revolt against Western countries, as evidenced by South Africa’s petition to the International Court of Justice, which went unheeded.
The role of International Humanitarian Law
Cornelio Sommaruga, a respected president of the ICRC (1987-1999) who passed away in Geneva in February 2024, stated on May 30, 1995, during the ceremony for the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II: “Thus, all states are co-responsible for ensuring that even in the midst of any war, including civil wars, some basic principles of humanity are respected, and that in particular the wounded, prisoners, and civilian populations are protected.”
How can one not agree with such an analysis when observing the fate of nearly 2 million inhabitants of a territory torn apart by one of the most powerful armies in the world? What can we reasonably expect from an IHL trampled upon, as well as from the tool of universal peace sought through the creation of the United Nations at the end of World War II, now paralyzed? For if the law of the strongest prevails with impunity in Gaza, how can we demand that it be different elsewhere?
Pierre Micheletti is a member of the National Consultative Commission on Human Rights, an advisory body in France that plays a crucial role in promoting and protecting human rights. He is also former president of the international humanitarian organization Action Against Hunger and (Doctors of the World), another such foundation that provides medical care to vulnerable populations, especially in conflict zones.
Republished with permission from La Croix International.
