Israel expanded its ground operations inside Gaza this weekend, three weeks after Hamas launched the deadliest attack on Israelis in the country’s history. On 7 October, Hamas-led militants crossed from Gaza into southern Israel, attacking communities, a music festival and military positions, killing large numbers of civilians and soldiers and taking hundreds of people hostage. Israel responded with an enormous air campaign against Gaza, a tightening siege and now expanding ground operations intended, according to the Israeli government, to destroy Hamas’s military and governing capabilities and secure the release of hostages. Gaza’s civilian population is simultaneously experiencing an increasingly severe humanitarian catastrophe.
The first principle should be straightforward: Hamas’s deliberate attacks on civilians and hostage-taking are indefensible. Palestinian dispossession, occupation, blockade and the failure of a political settlement provide essential historical context for understanding why the Israeli-Palestinian conflict persists. They do not provide legal or moral justification for intentionally killing civilians. Context explains the environment in which violence develops; it does not remove individual responsibility for the methods actors choose.
The same analytical standard has to apply to Israel. The fact that Israel suffered an extraordinary attack gives it a legitimate right to protect its population and use force against Hamas. It does not remove the rules governing that force. International humanitarian law exists precisely because states fighting enemies responsible for atrocities remain constrained in how they conduct war. If the brutality of an opponent automatically suspended those constraints, the laws of war would apply only during conflicts in which nobody felt sufficiently threatened to violate them.
This distinction between jus ad bellum and jus in bello is essential. The first concerns whether resorting to force is legally justified. The second concerns how force may be used once war begins. A state can possess a legitimate reason to fight and still use particular methods unlawfully. Conversely, questions about particular Israeli strikes do not erase Hamas’s responsibility for the attacks that initiated the present war. Different legal questions need different answers.
Gaza makes those constraints extraordinarily difficult to implement because it is one of the world’s most densely populated territories, containing more than two million people inside a narrow coastal strip. Hamas operates within this civilian environment rather than on a conventional battlefield geographically separated from the population. Military infrastructure, tunnels, fighters and weapons can therefore exist close to homes, hospitals, schools and other civilian facilities.
That does not make every civilian location immune from military operations if it becomes a legitimate military objective. It also does not make every location containing suspected Hamas activity automatically targetable regardless of civilian consequences. The principles of distinction, proportionality and precautions in attack still apply. Militaries must distinguish military objectives from civilians and civilian objects, assess expected civilian harm relative to anticipated concrete and direct military advantage, and take feasible precautions to reduce that harm.
Proportionality is particularly misunderstood in public debate. It does not mean Israel may kill the same number of Palestinians that Hamas killed Israelis, as though international law operates through numerical retaliation. It concerns the relationship between the expected civilian harm from an individual attack and the anticipated military advantage of that attack. A war can therefore involve enormously unequal casualty totals without that fact alone determining legality, while an individual strike can still be disproportionate regardless of the overall casualty ratio.
This matters because political discourse increasingly reduces civilian deaths to competing statistics. Israelis point towards approximately 1,200 people killed on October 7 and the hundreds taken hostage. Palestinians and humanitarian organisations point towards the rapidly increasing death toll in Gaza. Both sets of numbers represent human beings rather than moral credits that cancel one another.
Civilian suffering on one side does not purchase permission for civilian suffering on the other.
This is one of the most important principles to preserve during war because collective identity makes reciprocal punishment emotionally attractive. Hamas killed Israeli civilians, therefore Gaza should pay. Israel bombs Gaza, therefore Israeli civilians become legitimate targets. Once that logic is accepted, civilian status disappears and entire populations become extensions of whichever armed organisation claims to represent them.
That is precisely what humanitarian law attempts to prevent.
Hamas is not the Palestinian civilian population. The Israeli government is not the Israeli civilian population. Political and military responsibility belongs to actors according to their conduct rather than being inherited collectively through nationality.
This distinction becomes especially important because Hamas has governed Gaza since 2007, but that does not mean every Gazan consented meaningfully to Hamas’s current actions. Gaza has not held another general election since Hamas’s electoral victory in 2006 and subsequent violent split with Fatah. A substantial share of Gaza’s present population was either too young to vote then or not yet born.
Treating Gaza’s civilians as collectively responsible for Hamas therefore fails even on a crude electoral theory of responsibility.
The same principle should protect Israeli civilians from arguments that settlements, occupation or Israeli government policy somehow make attacks on ordinary Israelis legitimate. Citizens possess varying political preferences and varying degrees of influence over government. Even citizens strongly supporting a government’s policies remain civilians unless they directly participate in hostilities.
War does not convert political disagreement into combatant status.
The hostage crisis makes Israel’s strategic problem even harder. Hundreds of people were abducted into Gaza, including civilians, soldiers, children and elderly people. Israel therefore has two objectives that can conflict operationally: destroying Hamas’s military capabilities and recovering hostages alive.
A massive military campaign may pressure Hamas and create opportunities for rescue.
It can also endanger hostages held inside areas being bombed or fought over.
Negotiation may secure releases.
It can also provide Hamas with bargaining leverage and potentially encourage future hostage-taking if kidnapping produces sufficiently valuable concessions.
This is another credible commitment and incentive problem. Governments have overwhelming humanitarian reasons to recover their citizens. Terrorist and militant organisations understand that democratic governments place enormous value on individual lives and can exploit that preference.
Protecting citizens therefore creates vulnerability to coercion.
That does not mean governments should become indifferent to hostages. It means hostage policy inevitably involves a trade-off between the immediate obligation towards current captives and the future incentives created by whatever concessions secure their release.
Israel has confronted this before, most famously in the 2011 Gilad Shalit exchange, when more than one thousand Palestinian prisoners were released in return for one Israeli soldier. One of those prisoners was Yahya Sinwar, who later became Hamas’s leader in Gaza.
Historical outcomes therefore shape today’s bargaining calculations.
The humanitarian situation inside Gaza creates another strategic problem because Israel’s military objective is not occurring separately from the population whose political future will determine whether Hamas or a successor organisation can recruit later. Destroying military capability today while generating enormous civilian anger can reduce one security threat while increasing the political conditions from which another eventually emerges.
This is the counterinsurgency paradox. Force can eliminate fighters and infrastructure. Excessive civilian harm can simultaneously create grievances that make future mobilisation easier.
Military effectiveness therefore cannot be measured only through how many targets are destroyed.
The relevant strategic question is whether the operation leaves Israel safer several years from now.
That requires defining what “destroy Hamas” actually means. Hamas is simultaneously an armed organisation, political movement, governing institution and ideological network. Israel can destroy weapons, tunnels, command centres and individual leaders. Eliminating an ideology is much harder because ideas do not occupy buildings that can simply be bombed.
This does not mean military action is pointless. Armed organisations depend on material capabilities. Reducing those capabilities can significantly reduce their ability to conduct attacks.
It means military success requires a political theory of what replaces the destroyed organisation.
Who governs Gaza afterwards?
The Palestinian Authority?
A new local administration?
An Arab-backed transitional structure?
Israel?
If the military campaign succeeds tactically but leaves a political vacuum, another armed organisation can eventually fill it.
Iraq after 2003 demonstrated the danger of destroying a governing structure without possessing a workable institutional replacement. The contexts are very different, but the general lesson is relevant: removing an enemy is not the same as constructing the order that follows.
This is why Israel’s end state matters now, not only after fighting stops.
A military strategy should connect operations to a political objective.
Otherwise tactical success can accumulate without producing strategic success.
The United States has reportedly urged Israel to clarify those objectives while continuing to support Israel’s right to defend itself. Washington faces its own difficult balance because Israel is one of America’s closest regional partners, while the United States also claims to support international humanitarian law and an eventual two-state solution.
This creates another test of the rules-based international order. Rules become credible when governments apply them to allies as well as adversaries. Washington condemned Russian attacks affecting Ukrainian civilian infrastructure and has repeatedly emphasised civilian protection in Ukraine.
Those principles cannot become less important because the military conducting operations is an ally.
Consistency does not require pretending Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Israel’s war against Hamas are identical conflicts. They are not.
It requires applying comparable legal principles to comparable conduct.
Western credibility across the Global South will partly depend on whether governments can make that distinction convincingly. Many developing countries already argue that Western states apply international law selectively, condemning violations by adversaries while interpreting allies’ actions more generously.
That perception has geopolitical consequences beyond Gaza.
International law depends heavily on reciprocity and legitimacy because there is no world government capable of enforcing every rule consistently. If states increasingly believe rules are simply instruments powerful countries use against opponents, incentives to comply weaken.
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict therefore affects the legitimacy of institutions far beyond the region.
Iran adds another strategic layer. Tehran supports Hamas, Hezbollah in Lebanon and several armed groups across the Middle East, although support does not mean Iran directly controlled every decision surrounding October 7. Israel therefore confronts not simply Hamas but a broader regional network of Iranian-aligned actors.
The danger is horizontal escalation.
Hezbollah and Israel have already exchanged fire across the Lebanese border. Iranian-backed groups can target American forces in Iraq or Syria. Israel can strike targets associated with Iran. Each front creates another opportunity for miscalculation.
A Gaza war can therefore become a regional war without any government deliberately deciding at the beginning to create one.
This is the escalation-chain problem. One actor responds to another. The response creates pressure for retaliation. Each government claims it is restoring deterrence rather than escalating.
Eventually everyone is retaliating for the previous retaliation.
This is why restraint should not be interpreted automatically as weakness. Governments sometimes need to absorb limited provocations because responding maximally would produce a much worse equilibrium.
The difficulty is that restraint can encourage further attacks if adversaries interpret it as unwillingness to impose costs.
Again, deterrence requires strength and reassurance simultaneously.
The humanitarian debate also needs to distinguish between intent and foreseeable consequence. Hamas’s deliberate targeting of civilians on October 7 makes civilian harm part of the intended method. Israeli military operations are officially directed towards Hamas rather than Palestinian civilians.
That difference is morally and legally significant.
It does not make foreseeable civilian consequences irrelevant.
If a military knows an attack is likely to kill large numbers of civilians, the absence of a desire to kill those civilians does not eliminate obligations concerning proportionality and precautions.
Intent matters.
Consequences matter too.
Political debate frequently chooses one and ignores the other.
Supporters of Israel emphasise intent and Hamas’s use of civilian areas.
Critics emphasise Palestinian casualties and destruction.
A serious analysis needs both because law itself evaluates both the military objective and expected civilian harm.
The siege of Gaza raises particularly difficult questions because Israel initially cut electricity and restricted supplies of fuel, food and water entering the territory. Israel argues that Hamas exploits resources entering Gaza and that siege pressure forms part of the military campaign. Humanitarian organisations warn that restricting essentials across an entire civilian population creates severe risks to hospitals, sanitation and survival.
Again, Hamas’s presence among civilians does not remove civilian needs.
Humanitarian assistance therefore requires mechanisms capable of delivering food, water and medicine while reducing diversion towards armed groups.
That is administratively difficult.
Difficulty does not remove the obligation to attempt it.
The opening of limited humanitarian aid through the Rafah crossing from Egypt is therefore important, but the scale of need remains enormous.
Egypt itself faces a difficult dilemma. Opening its border fully could save Palestinian lives immediately but might also create permanent displacement if Palestinians are unable to return to Gaza later. Egyptian leaders and many Palestinians fear another Nakba-like displacement, while Israel wants civilians away from combat areas.
A humanitarian action can therefore possess political consequences extending decades beyond the emergency.
This is why telling civilians simply to “leave” is not straightforward when they do not know whether leaving becomes permanent.
The history of Palestinian displacement makes that fear rational.
The war therefore contains several overlapping time horizons. Israel needs to prevent another October 7 attack immediately. Palestinians need food, water and physical safety immediately. Hostages need release immediately.
Yet decisions made for those immediate objectives shape the political environment years from now.
Emergency policy and long-term strategy can conflict.
A government traumatised by attack understandably prioritises eliminating the immediate threat.
Strategic leadership requires considering what follows after the threat is reduced.
This may be the hardest demand to make of societies during war because fear compresses political time. Citizens want safety now. Governments promise decisive action now.
Long-term consequences feel abstract.
But wars are often won or lost strategically through exactly those consequences.
Israel possesses overwhelming conventional military superiority over Hamas.
The difficult question is not whether Israel can destroy large amounts of Hamas infrastructure.
It is whether doing so produces a political order in which Israelis and Palestinians become safer.
If the campaign destroys Hamas’s current capabilities while deepening conditions producing another generation of militancy, tactical victory can coexist with strategic failure.
If Israel refrains from substantial action while Hamas retains the capability and incentive to repeat October 7, restraint can equally produce strategic failure.
There is no costless option.
That is why moral clarity about civilians should coexist with strategic humility about solutions.
Hamas’s massacre was wrong.
Hostage-taking is wrong.
Israel has a right to defend its citizens.
Palestinian civilians retain protection under international law.
Those statements do not contradict one another.
Political discourse increasingly behaves as though accepting one requires weakening another because conflict creates pressure to choose a complete narrative.
Reality is less cooperative.
Two populations can experience genuine trauma simultaneously.
One armed actor’s crimes do not legalise another actor’s excesses.
Historical injustice can explain violence without justifying it.
Military necessity can justify force without eliminating limits on force.
This is precisely why laws of war exist.
They do not determine which population deserves sympathy.
They attempt to preserve the category of civilian when every political incentive during war pushes towards erasing it.
The most dangerous idea emerging from conflicts like this is collective responsibility: that Palestinians must answer for Hamas because Hamas governs Gaza, or Israelis must answer for their government because they are Israeli.
Once civilians become morally interchangeable with governments and armed organisations, there is no limiting principle left.
Israel’s security cannot sustainably depend on treating Gaza’s population as Hamas.
Palestinian liberation cannot morally depend on treating Israeli civilians as extensions of the Israeli state.
The distinction between combatant and civilian is not an obstacle to justice.
It is the minimum condition preventing political conflict from becoming unlimited violence.
Three weeks after October 7, Israel’s ground campaign is expanding.
The tactical battle will be measured in territory, tunnels, commanders and hostages.
The strategic outcome will be harder to measure.
It will depend on whether whatever emerges from this war creates fewer reasons and fewer capabilities for another one.
That requires something military power alone cannot produce.
Eventually, somebody has to construct a political future capable of making violence less useful than politics.
Right now, that future looks extraordinarily distant.
That makes preserving the rules limiting the present violence even more important.
