It has been that the International Criminal Court is preparing arrest warrants for possible war crimes against Israeli leadership including President Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. This comes at a time when protesters in university campuses across the US are calling for an end to Israel-Hamas war, claiming among other things, that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people.
The case for calling what the Israeli military is doing “genocide” involves several components. According to the Gaza Health Ministry, two-thirds of the over 34,000 Palestinians killed have been women and children. Civilians appear to be the bulk of the deaths in Gaza so far.
Israel has also made it very difficult for humanitarian aid to reach Palestinians in a state of famine. Thankfully, it appears that steps are being taken to remedy this, although much more can still be done. Israel is opening aid corridors into Gaza, allowing greater numbers of shipments, while the US is actively building a pier for aid delivery.
But with respect to the high civilian casualty numbers, Israeli and US officials claim that the reason they are so high is because Hamas employs human shields – operating out of civilian structures and urging its people to ignore Israeli calls to evacuate. The IDF has military bases in residential areas, but there’s a difference between having civilian-adjacent bases and having bases within a civilian structure with civilians actively inhabiting it.
A pressing moral question is, even if Hamas is using human shields, is it still permissible to attack them given the high probability of civilian casualties? We might think that the ethics here are the same when you think about it from the individual perspective. Suppose that someone was actively trying to kill you but they took a human hostage. You know that the only way to prevent them from killing you is to shoot the aggressor. This has the unfortunate consequence that there is a high risk that the hostage will also be killed. Must you allow yourself to be killed in order to prevent harm to the hostage? I think it’s permissible for you to defend yourself in this case.
On the other hand, the Israelis are now the aggressors and it can be argued that they are not currently engaged in self-defense. The IDF can retreat back to Israel and Hamas fighters are not likely to pursue. So it’s more analogous to someone killing a family member and then running away, with you chasing after them looking for revenge.
But we know with near certainty that if the IDF retreats and allows Hamas to continue to exist, they will kill innocent civilians in the future. So the justification is preventing future deaths. If you know with near certainty that some bad actor will harm civilians in the future, is it permissible to kill them even if they are not currently the aggressor and even if they are using human shields?
The answer is unclear but you can make a case that it’s permissible for a state to prevent future harms to their population. At least this suggests that it’s not clearly immoral for the IDF to target Hamas fighters even if there is a high chance of civilian deaths, albeit with perhaps greater care to avoid the deaths of innocents than the IDF is currently employing.
It’s important to understand that genocide is the intentional killing of a large number of people from some ethnic or cultural group. If the high number of civilian casualties can be explained by Hamas operating among civilians, it suggests that the intention is the elimination of future threats, not of targeting civilians for the purposes of genocide.
What complicates this line of reasoning is the instances we have of the IDF employing controversial tactics, such as the use of unguided bombs throughout the campaign. The discussion is just so easy to obfuscate. Some claim that the IDF has been using a “dive bomb” technique while deploying unguided munitions, which is supposed to make them roughly as accurate as guided ordnance.
This makes it all the more challenging to determine whether to attribute the high civilian casualty rate to genocidal intentions, to an unfortunate consequence of Hamas’ decision to fight among civilians, or to the Israelis simply not caring enough about Palestinian lives to avoid high collateral attacks. The fog of war facilitates the concealment of atrocities while simultaneously hiding the details we need to determine whether they are happening.
Ultimately, the criterion of intention for classifying something as genocide is irrelevant. Whether or not it’s the intention of the Israeli government to destroy the Palestinian people, too many people are dying and aid must be allowed to reach starving Palestinians. While the US should continue its strategic partnership with Israel, it must leverage its soft power to save as many innocents as possible.
Rafael Perez is a doctoral candidate in philosophy at the University of Rochester. You can reach him at rafaelperezocregister@gmail.com.
