If Israel regards its conflict with Hamas as war, it is liable to abide by the international rules of war

The Israeli Defence Force, its spokesman Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari said this week, is a “professional military committed to international law”.

The killing of seven humanitarian workers by the IDF this week, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said, was a “tragic case of our forces unintentionally hitting innocent people in the Gaza strip. This happens in war”.

Hagari and Netanyahu’s comments once again confirmed that Israel regards the conflict with Hamas, a non-state actor, in Gaza as war, and that it is therefore liable to abide by the international rules of war.

But something snapped this week in the international community’s tolerance for Israel’s repeated alleged breaches of those rules of war, let alone its tolerance of a tragedy that has seen tens of thousands of civilians killed since October 7.

The history of the Jewish people, the atrocities committed by Hamas on Israelis on October 7, the taking of Israeli hostages, Israel’s right to self-defence: these have all fed into the international community’s tardiness to confront Israel about its actions in Gaza.

Australia has been part of this tardiness which has been based to varying degrees on a debate conducted on Israel’s terms, or excuses, rather than on the first principles of the UN charter: that the rights of all human beings need to be respected equally.

Few criticisms of Israel’s actions — until this week — have tended to be made without reference to the actions of Hamas on October 7.

That has all changed now, though there is also something disturbing about the fact that it has taken the killing of foreign nationals, including Australian Zomi Frankcom, rather than the killing of countless Palestinians, to apparently tip governments over into straight outrage.
‘This was not just a bad luck situation’

The Albanese government has clearly wrestled for months with how it should approach this issue, alive to the domestic community tensions it involves as much as any international ones.

The Dutton opposition has taken a much more straightforward approach of simply blaming everything on Hamas and firmly towing the Israeli line.

But surely it must be time for Australia to be starting from first principles of not just upholding the UN charter but calling out flagrant breaches of the rules of international warfare if it believes they have taken place, rather than finding justifications for Israel not doing so.
Anthony Albanese says he pushed for “full accountability” during a call with the Israeli PM.

José Andrés, the head of World Central Kitchens, the humanitarian agency that employed the slain workers, described to the Reuters news agency this week what he understood to have happened on a road running down the coast in Gaza on Monday night (Gaza time).

His account appears to have been backed by investigations by international media outlets.

“This was not just a bad luck situation where ‘Oops, we dropped the bomb in the wrong place,'” he said.

“[The three cars were spread] over 1.5, 1.8 kilometres, with a very defined humanitarian convoy that had signs in the top, in the roof, a very colourful logo that we are obviously very proud of.”

He said after the IDF attacked the first armoured car, the team was able to escape and move to a second car which was then attacked, forcing them to move to the third car.

The aid workers tried to communicate to make clear who they were, he said, adding IDF knew they were in the area which it controlled. Mr Andrés said the third car was then hit, “and we saw the consequences of that”.
This is not the only incident

This has hardly been the only incident in which civilians or aid workers have been killed by the IDF in controversial circumstances.

Israeli forces even killed three of their own hostages who were waving a white flag on open ground.

Israeli newspaper Haaretz documents a military chain of command that would seem to make such incidents easy to understand, with local commanders left to designated “kill zones” or combat zones, the boundaries of which are not determined in advance.

A reservist who has served in Gaza told Haaretz that “in practice, a terrorist is anyone the IDF has killed in the areas in which its forces operate”.
Australia demands ‘accountability’ for Zomi’s death in Gaza. What does that look like?

There have been many “tipping points” since the war in Gaza began nearly six months ago. But this week’s deadly Israeli air strike on an aid convoy has left one side of Australian politics reacting in fury.
A woman in a World Central Kitchen shirt smiles at the camera standing in a cafe
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Pending the release of the official Israeli investigation into the incident, there have been a couple of different explanations for the debacle — one that the convoy was simply misidentified despite the negotiations with the IDF; another that local forces believed there was a Hamas fighter travelling in the convoy.

The Times newspaper spoke to Chris Lincoln-Jones, a former British Army major who has worked with the IDF, who said of the World Central Kitchens incident that even if Hamas fighters had been in the cars, there were questions about why the attack had been authorised.

“The British Army would under no circumstances have fired on that convoy, even if we could positively identify a Hamas gunman getting into one of the cars. You would know that every single person in the car would die. It would be inconceivable that the British or Americans would do that. The fact the Israelis destroyed all three cars is unforgivable,” Lincoln-Jones said.

“Hamas is a terrorist organisation completely beyond the pale. What Hamas doesn’t do is claim to be anything else than what it is. The Israelis claim to be a civilised, western-facing armed force. They are plainly not.”