Kenneth Roth, former executive director of Human Rights Watch (1993-2022), on atrocities and the moral high ground and international humanitarian law:

Hamas’s appalling attack on Israeli civilians has been widely described as the country’s “9/11 moment”. It is an appropriate description of such wanton cruelty. But the analogy carries a cautionary note as well.

The US government lost the world’s sympathy, and the moral high ground, when its response to 9/11 degenerated into a highly abusive war in Iraq, systematic torture, and endless detention without trial in Guantánamo. The Israeli government should be careful not to replicate this path to opprobrium. Indeed, such an abusive response may be exactly what Hamas wanted to provoke.

Hamas also thinks it’s on Team Allah, which naturally means that whatever it does is ok. George Bush thinks he’s on Team Baby Jesus, so there you go. Thinking you’re on Team God, aka theocracy, is practically a guarantee that human rights are entirely off the table, as is ordinary compassion.

Yes, Palestinians were understandably frustrated as Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right government kept expanding the illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, boxing in the people of Gaza with a punitive blockade, and imposing a discriminatory and oppressive rule on millions of Palestinians under occupation that has been widely described as apartheid. To make matters worse, one Arab government after another has been normalizing relations with Israel after at most token concessions to the Palestinians that did nothing to change their persecution. Still, none of that justifies resort to war crimes, as Hamas has done.

Especially when the war crimes are punishing people who are not Netanyahu and his far-right government.

It is a basic premise of international humanitarian law that war crimes by one side do not justify war crimes by the other. Of necessity, given the passions, charges and counter-charges of most wars, the duty to comply with the rules designed to spare civilians as much as possible the hazards of war is absolute, not contingent on the behavior of opponents.

But Hamas doesn’t care and neither does Netanyahu.

The Israeli government already seems to be flouting those rules. The declared siege of Gaza, blocking food, water, and electricity, violates the duty to allow humanitarian aid to civilians in need, as the people of Gaza certainly are as they suffer massive Israeli bombardment. In the first day of those airstrikes, the Israeli military targeted four large apartment towers. In the past, Israel has purported to justify such attacks because of an ostensible Hamas office somewhere in the complex, but the civilian cost of rendering hundreds of Palestinians homeless is wholly disproportionate.

One attack hit a market, reportedly killing dozens. The UN says two hospitals have been hit.

Though apparently less frequently than in the past, the Israeli military has at times been issuing warnings to Palestinian civilians, which it is required to do whenever feasible, but that does not provide carte blanche to attack. In the 2006 war against Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, the Israeli military issued similar warnings and then attacked anyone who remained as if they were all Hezbollah fighters, even though many civilians were unable or unwilling to flee. In Gaza, the Israeli military is reportedly flattening neighborhoods after such warnings – attacks that not only endanger any civilians who remain but also seem more designed to punish the civilian population than to target Hamas fighters who impose their will on the people of Gaza by force.

Well it’s like this: it’s easier to bomb the civilian population than it is to find Hamas and bomb them.

There is also something cruel and otherworldly about the Israeli government’s warning to the people of Gaza to flee. Where? From one densely populated Gaza neighborhood to another as they are pummeled in turn? To Egypt, which has helped Israel reinforce the blockade and has shown no inclination to welcome the 2.2 million residents of the territory? After the warning, the Israeli military bombed the crossing to Egypt. And if people escaped Gaza, would Israel ever let them return, or would this be another one-way flight as in 1948?

There seems to be no escape for anyone.