Philippe Lazzarini, the commissioner general of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (Unrwa) says that Gaza is “becoming the graveyard of international humanitarian law”.

International humanitarian law (IHL), regulates the conduct of armed conflict, which is the legal expression for war. It covers everything from what is a lawful target, to the treatment of prisoners and injured people, and even to the testing of new weapons. The main rules of IHL can be found in the Geneva Conventions of 1949.

Lazzarini, though, has gone so far as to say that we “have made the Geneva convention[s] almost irrelevant. What is happening and being accepted today in Gaza is not something that can be isolated; it will become the new norm for all future conflicts”.

There can be no doubt that the situation in Gaza is dire. There is plausible evidence of the Israeli military carrying out war crimes there in its military operation triggered by, and commenced soon after, the devastating attack by Hamas against Israel on October 7 2023. The Hamas attack itself involved the commission of war crimes – and so does its taking of hostages and the subsequent treatment of them in captivity. But to say that all these atrocities render the law irrelevant is........

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