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2 June 2024

Do We Still Understand How Wars are Won?


I condemn the recent strike on Rafah because the civilian-to-militant death ratio was disproportional.

Just to make one point about international law - that isn't exactly the "proportion" that it addresses (well, obliquely it does). The proportionality analysis is that any anticipated harm to civilians must be proportional to the anticipated military advantage. While, clearly, a higher ratio of civilian casualties to military casualties may indicate that the proportion of harm to civilians against military advantage is higher, that isn't necessarily the case - military advantage is not merely calculated based on number of soldiers killed (and, for that matter, civilian harm is not merely calculated based on civilians killed).

Furthermore, the relevant question is the anticipated harm and anticipated advantage - if the side making the attack reasonably anticipates less harm, it isn't necessarily a war crime even if the actual result is disproportionate. And in the case of the Rafah strike, Israel at least claims that it did not anticipate the fire which caused many of the civilian casualties. As I've said before, we aren't in the Israeli targeting room, and this war is complex, so we should wait to rush to judgment about war crimes - we don't know what Israel anticipated, or whether that anticipation was reasonable (for instance, if the targeter had intel that munitions were being stored nearby, was it a reasonable assumption that using the weapon at issue would cause secondary explosions, and should that have been considered in the strike decision?) We simply do not know.

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