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Israel Is Allowed to Target Hamas Terrorists; International Law Is Not a Suicide Pact
A home destroyed in Kibbutz Nir Oz in southern Israel during Hamas’ Oct. 7 terrorist attack that is featured in the film Kibbutz Nir Oz by “Uvda.” Photo: Screenshot
“Each state is expected to aid and enforce the law of nations, as part of the common law, by inflicting an adequate punishment upon the offenses against that universal law.” William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Law of England (1765)
Israel’s targeted killing of Hamas leader Marwan Issa in mid-March raises tactical and legal questions. Though it is unclear that such tactics can diminish tangible terror threats to Israel, there is also no reason to rule out their permissibility under international law. In the final analysis, such permissibility derives from the world legal system’s continuously anarchic structure and from the corresponding right of all nation-states states to protect their citizens from willful slaughter.
There are many clarifying details. By definition, world legal authority remains a fundamentally “self-help,” or vigilante system of justice. It is amid this perpetual global anarchy that every anti-terror government must systematically assess its strategic and tactical options. The victim of this necessary act (a targeted air attack) was a key Hamas planner of the October 7, 2024, assault on Israeli civilians, a murderous terror assault that combined the mass killing of noncombatants with the orchestrated rape of Israeli civilians.
Hamas, like Hezbollah, draws tangible support from Iran. A principal risk of leaving this insidious symbiosis unchallenged would be a direct Iranian attack on Israel that escalates incrementally into unconventional belligerency. Eventually, even if Iran were to remain non-nuclear, an intra-crisis search for “escalation dominance” by Israel and Iran could produce unprecedented nuclear conflict. This sui generis result could be produced suddenly, as a “bolt-from-the-blue,” or in variously hard to decipher increments. Initially, it could “present” as an Iranian use of radiation dispersal weapons (nuclear radiation rather than nuclear explosives), or as a conventional attack on Israel’s nuclear reactor at Dimona.
Under international law, which is binding upon all sovereign states, terrorism represents a crime that should be prevented and must be punished. As was learned originally from Roman law and Jewish law (Torah), a universal rule exists. This “peremptory” rule affirms the core principle of “No crime without a punishment,” or Nullum crimen sine poena. It can be discovered, among other sources, at the London Charter of August 8, 1945. This is the founding document of the post-war Nuremberg Tribunal.
In formal jurisprudence, terrorists are known as hostes humani generis, or “common enemies of humankind.” While the world legal system allows or even encourages certain insurgencies in matters of “self-determination,” there is nothing about these matters that can ever justify deliberate attacks on civilians. In this connection, it is important to remember that an integral part of all criminal law is the underlying presence of mens rea, or “criminal intent.”
On this point, there can be no reasonable comparison of Marwan Issa’s deliberate mass murder of Israeli noncombatants, and the unintended civilian harms now being suffered in Gaza. As a matter of law, responsibility for such ongoing harms falls entirely upon the “perfidious” behavior (i.e., “human shields”) of Hamas and Iran, and not on Israeli forces acting on behalf of legitimate self-defense.
Under the law of war, even where an insurgent use of force has supportable “just cause,” it must still fight with “just means.” Accordingly, the vapid phrase “One man’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter,” is never more than an empty witticism.
There is more. Ordinarily, assassination, like terrorism, is a crime under international law. Under certain conditions, however, the targeted killing of terrorist leaders can represent a life-saving and heroic example of indispensable law-enforcement. In a more perfect world legal system, perhaps, there could be no defensible justification for any violent self-help expressions of international justice. But this is not yet such a world.
In our self-defense oriented world legal order, the only state alternative to launching precise targeting actions against terrorists would be to allow incessantly escalating terror-violence against the innocent. Among pertinent clarifications, this is because terror-organizations like Hamas and terror-mentoring states like Iran harbor undisguised contempt for all ordinary legal expectations of criminal extradition. The formal term for this ignored expectation is “extradite or prosecute;” or aut dedere, aut judicare.
At first glance, to accept the targeted killings of terrorist leaders as law-enforcing remediation would seem to disregard the usual obligations of “due process.” Still, international relations are not overseen by the same civil protections offered by individual national governments, and terrorist leaders like Marwan Issa undertake barbarous attacks on men, women, and children with undisguised enthusiasm.
In the future, if Hamas and related terrorist criminals are effectively held immune by civilized states, indiscriminate attacks could exploit chemical, biological, or even nuclear elements. For the moment, a nuclear option would be limited to “only” a “dirty bomb” (radiation dispersal weapons), but this could change. To be sure, in the foreseeable future, Iran could fashion and deploy an authentic “chain-reaction” nuclear explosive.
There is more. The willfully indiscriminate nature of jihadist terrorist operations (not just Hamas) is well documented. Such intentional blurring of the lines between lawful and unlawful targets is rooted in certain generic principles of “holy war.” Several years ago, an oft-repeated remark by Sheikh Omar Bakri Muhammad, then a prominent Muslim cleric in London, explained core doctrinal linkages between Islamic terror and “holy war:”
Said the Sheikh, “We don’t make a distinction between civilians and non-civilians, innocents and non-innocents. Only between Muslims and unbelievers. And the life of an unbeliever (a Jew or Christian) has no value. It has no sanctity.”
International law is not a suicide pact, especially when an adversary remains indifferent to its unassailable claims.
As was learned yet again on October 7, 2023, jihadist attackers add gratuitously barbarous effects to their corrosive primal ideologies. At “bottom line,” these are belief systems that gleefully embrace the sacrificial slaughter of “unbelievers.” To wit, for Hamas and related terror groups, “military objectives” have “normally” included elementary schools, bomb shelters, ice-cream parlors, civilian bus stops, and elderly pedestrians. In law, these perpetrators ought never to be called “militants.” Whatever their alleged cause, they are criminals of the irredeemably worst sort.
There is a related point. Though jihadists may call themselves “martyrs,” the personal death such terrorists seem anxious to suffer is presumptively just a transient inconvenience on the path to “paradise” and immortality. As this path is “glorious,” these jihadists are not “merely” aspiring mass murderers. They are also consummate cowards.
Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, and other terror groups remain dedicated to the idea that any peace agreement with Israel must represent an intolerable abomination to Islam. Facing these implacable enemies within a self-help system of international law, Israel deserves the self-defending right to target refractory terrorist leaders. Determining whether such self-help remedies are also militarily sound raises another question altogether.
In the final analysis, what is most noteworthy about the targeted killing of terrorist leaders is not its permissibility in law, but the widespread global unwillingness to endorse or even acknowledge this critical right.
In current jurisprudence, an ancient principle still holds true: Ubi cessat remedium ordinarium, ibi decurritur ad extraordinarium — “Where the ordinary remedy fails, recourse must be had to an extraordinary one.”
Under international law, every state maintains the inherent right and corollary obligation to protect its citizens from transnational criminal harms. In exceptional circumstances, this dual responsibility can extend to the targeted killing of terrorist leaders. Otherwise, on its face, world law would in fact be a suicide pact.
Targeted killings, subject to applicable legal rules of distinction, proportionality, and military necessity, could sometimes offer the least unwelcome form of national self-protection. In such cases, especially where additional terror-crimes are still in a planning stage, the legal acceptability of violent self-help measures is greater ipso facto. In our continuously anarchic system of international law, this proposition is beyond any logical doubt. The world legal system is designed to protect us all from foreseeable infringements of human rights. Ironically, however, this same decentralized system still has no independent means to meet such a primary obligation.
In the best of all possible worlds, targeted killing could expect no defensible place in law-based counter-terrorism. But we do not yet live in the best of all possible worlds, and the negative aspects of any such action ought never to be evaluated apart from alternative policy outcomes. If Israel had chosen not to target Marwan Issa so as not to injure the sensibilities of “civilized nations” (a phrase codified at article 38 of the Statute of the International Court of Justice), it would have brought extensive injury to many innocent human beings.
Counter-terrorism should always be governed by rational and justice-oriented decision-making processes. If the expected costs of a targeted assassination appear lower than the expected costs of all other plausible self-defense options, such a self-defense operation must emerge as the patently rational choice. However odious it might first appear in vacuo, targeted killing in such circumstances could offer a beleaguered state the least injurious path to security from terrorist criminality.
Inevitably, targeted killings, even of Hamas leaders like Marwan Issa, will elicit righteous indignation from many quarters. For now, however, the philosophic promise of centralized international law remains far from being realized, and continuously beleaguered states such as Israel will need to consider multiple operational choices. In facing such bewildering choices, states would soon discover that all viable alternatives to targeted-killing also include violence, and that these alternatives could plausibly exact a much larger human toll.
Sir William Blackstone’s 18th century Commentaries, the foundation of United States jurisprudence, explain that because international law is an integral part of each individual state’s “common law,” all states are “expected to aid and enforce the law of nations.” This must be accomplished “by inflicting an adequate punishment upon the offenses against that universal law.” Derivatively, by its precisely targeted removal of Hamas terrorist leader Marwan Issa, Israel acted not in violation of the law of nations, but in its indispensable enforcement. Presently, this neglected clarification of global justice should not be undervalued or overlooked.
Louis René Beres was educated at Princeton (Ph.D., 1971) and is the author of many books and scholarly articles dealing with international law, nuclear strategy, nuclear war, and terrorism. In Israel, Professor Beres was Chair of Project Daniel. His twelfth and latest book is titled Surviving Amid Chaos: Israel’s Nuclear Strategy (Rowman & Littlefield, 2016; 2nd ed., 2018). A version of this article was originally published by Israel National News.
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Antisemitism Continues to Skyrocket in France, With Over 1,500 Incidents Recorded in 2024, New Report Finds
Sign reading “+1000% of Antisemitic Acts: These Are Not Just Numbers” during a march against antisemitism, in Lyon, France, June 25, 2024. Photo: Romain Costaseca / Hans Lucas via Reuters Connect
Antisemitism in France continued to surge to alarming levels across the country last year, with 1,570 incidents recorded, according to a new bombshell report.
The Representative Council of Jewish Institutions of France (CRIF), the main representative body of French Jews, on Wednesday released its annual report on antisemitism, which was compiled by the Jewish Community Protection Service using data jointly recorded with the Ministry of the Interior.
The total number of antisemitic outrages last year was a slight dip from 2023’s record total of 1,676, but it marked a striking increase from the 436 antisemitic acts recorded in 2022.
In late May and early June, antisemitic acts rose by more than 140 percent, far surpassing the weekly average of slightly more than 30 incidents.
The report also found that 65.2 percent of antisemitic acts last year targeted individuals, with more than 10 percent of these offenses involving physical violence.
One such incident occurred in late June, when an elderly Jewish woman was attacked in a Paris suburb by two assailants who punched her in the face, pushed her to the ground, and kicked her while hurling antisemitic slurs, including “dirty Jew, this is what you deserve.”
In another egregious attack that garnered international headlines, a 12-year-old Jewish girl was raped by three Muslim boys in a different Paris suburb on June 15. The child told investigators that the assailants called her a “dirty Jew” and hurled other antisemitic comments at her during the attack. In response to the incident, French President Emmanuel Macron denounced the “scourge of antisemitism” plaguing his country.
Comme chaque année, le Crif publie le rapport annuel sur les chiffres de l’antisémitisme en France établi par le Service de Protection de la Communauté Juive (@SPCJFRANCE) sur la base des chiffres recensés conjointement entre le SPCJ et le ministère de l’Intérieur.
Pour la… pic.twitter.com/VuPwVXvq0f
— CRIF (@Le_CRIF) January 22, 2025
Antisemitism skyrocketed in France following the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas’s invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, amid the ensuing war in Gaza. According to CRIF’s report, the surge continued unabated last year, with over 30 percent of antisemitic incidents, or 43 out of an average of 130 per month, making direct reference to “Palestine.”
In November, for example, a monument honoring victims of the Nazis located in eastern France was vandalized with graffiti reading “Nique Israël,” or “F—k Israel” in English.
On the one-year anniversary of Hamas’s Oct. 7 atrocities, three men brutally attacked a Jewish woman at the entrance to her home in Paris. The victim stated that the assailants threatened her with a box knife, made antisemitic threats, and mentioned the events of last Oct. 7.
In September, a kosher restaurant in Villeurbanne, near the eastern city of Lyon, was defaced with red paint and tagged with the message “Free Gaza.”
CRIF’s latest data also showed that 192 antisemitic acts were committed in schools, which accounted for 12.2 percent of all such incidents recorded last year.
Synagogues were targeted as well. In August, for example, French police arrested a 33-year-old Algerian man suspected of trying to set a synagogue ablaze in the southern French city of la Grande-Motte.
France is one of several countries that has experienced a surge in anti-Jewish hate crimes and demonstrations since Hamas’s invasion of Israel.
According to a report from the World Zionist Organization and the Jewish Agency for Israel, there has been a staggering 340 percent increase in antisemitic acts worldwide in 2024 compared to 2022.
The report showed a sharp rise in antisemitic outrages in North America and Europe, with the US up 288 percent, Canada increasing by 562 percent, and Britain seeing a 450 percent spike, with nearly 2,000 incidents recorded in the first half of 2024 in the UK.
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Cornell University Statue Vandalized by Anti-Zionist Activists
Cornell University workers begin the work of cleaning anti-Zionist graffiti off a statue of the school’s co-founder on January 21, 2025. Photo: Screenshot
Anti-Zionist agitators at Cornell University kicked off the spring semester with an act of vandalism which defamed Israel as an “occupier” and practitioner of “apartheid.”
“Divest from death,” the students, who have not yet been identified, graffitied on a statue of Cornell co-founder Andrew Dickson White that is located on the Arts Quad section of campus — as first reported by The Cornell Daily Sun on Tuesday. “Occupation=death.”
Speaking anonymously to The Sun, the university’s official campus newspaper, the students provided an account of their grievances, which addressed what in their view is the insufficiency of the recently negotiated ceasefire between Hamas, a Palestinian terrorist group, and Israel. In so doing, they put forth the view that all of Israel must be surrendered to the Palestinians, whose leaders have serially rejected viable two-state solutions to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict ever since the United Nations voted in 1947, via Resolution 181, to partition what was then known as British Mandatory Palestine into Arab and Jewish states.
“We demand that Cornell divests from the weapons manufacturers that make genocide possible,” they said. “A ceasefire will save lives, and we hope it will be permanent. But a ceasefire is not a free Palestine, and we will organize until we see a liberated Palestine free from genocide, occupation, and apartheid.”
Anonymous collectives of anti-Zionists have vandalized Cornell University property before, and the school as a whole has seen some of the most disturbing incidents of campus antisemitism since Hamas’s massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
In August, a group vandalized the Day Hall administrative building, graffitiing “Israel bombs, Cornell pays” and “Blood is on your hands” on it and shattering the glazings of its front doors. They justified their actions.
“We had to accept that the only way to make ourselves heard is by targeting the only thing the university administration really cares about: property,” the students told The Sun. “With the start of this new academic year, the Cornell administration is trying desperately to upkeep a facade of normalcy knowing that, since last semester, they have been working tirelessly to uphold Cornell’s function as a fascist, classist, imperial machine.”
Anti-Zionists convulsed Cornell University’s campus during the 2023-2024 academic year, engaging in activities that are without precedent in the school’s 159-year history. Three weeks after Hamas’s massacre across southern Israel, now-former student Patrick Dai threatened to perpetrate heinous crimes against members of the school’s Jewish community, including mass murder and rape. Cornell students also occupied an administrative building and held a “mock trial” in which they convicted school president Martha Pollack of complicity in “apartheid” and “genocide against Palestinian civilians.” Meanwhile, history professor Russell Rickford called Hamas’s barbarity on Oct. 7 “exhilarating” and “energizing” at a pro-Palestinian rally held on campus.
By the end of the year, Pollack announced her resignation as president of the university, which followed the installment of an illegal “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” on the campus in which pro-Hamas students had lived and protested the university’s investments in companies linked to Israel.
Cornell now has a new interim president, Michael Kotlikoff, and his administration has vowed to punish and deter criminal behavior undertaken in the name of anti-Zionist activism.
“Acts of violence, extended occupations of buildings, or destruction of property (including graffiti), will not be tolerated and will be subject to immediate public safety response,” he said in August. “We will enforce these policies consistently, for every group or activity, on any issue or subject …We urge all members of the community to express their views in a manner that respects the rights of others. One voice may never stifle another. There is a time, place, and manner for all to speak and all to be heard.”
So far, Kotlikoff’s administration has executed its zero-tolerance policy, pursuing criminal investigations against protesters who break the law, as happened on Sept. 24 when a mass of students disrupted a career fair because it was attended by Boeing and L3Harris, an American defense contractor. The incident resulted in three arrests, and, later, severe disciplinary sanctions, including classifying five students as “persona non grata,” which, Cornell says, bans from campus “a person who has exhibited behavior which has been deemed detrimental to the university community.” However, the university did downgrade sanctions levied against a doctoral student after his supporters decried that dis-enrolling him as a student would lead inexorably to his deportation from the US.
Regarding this latest incident, Cornell has vowed to bring the vandals to justice.
“Vandalism violates our code of conduct and the law,” the Cornell University Police Department (CUPD) told The Sun. “Graffiti is property damage, which is a crime. We are committed to identifying the perpetrators responsible.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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Trump Fires Head of Terrorist-Linked World Central Kitchen From President’s Council on Sports, Fitness, Nutrition
World Central Kitchen (WCK) barge loaded with food arrives off the Gaza coast, in this handout image released March 15, 2024. Photo: Israel Defense Forces/Handout via REUTERS
US President Donald Trump on Tuesday announced the firing of celebrity chef Jose Andres, founder of the controversial World Central Kitchen (WCK), from the president’s Council on Sports, Fitness, and Nutrition, claiming that the restaurateur and humanitarian is “not aligned with” the current White House’s mission.
Trump shared the news of Andres’s departure in an “Official Notice of Dismissal” on social media. The statement explained that his administration is currently in the process of “identifying and removing over a thousand presidential appointees from the previous administration, who are not aligned with our vision to Make America Great Again.”
Over the past year, Andres has found himself embroiled in controversy regarding the alleged conduct of WCK employees in Gaza. WCK, a US-based NGO founded by Andres to help feed needy people caught in disasters or conflict zones, has been operating with roughly 500 employees in Gaza since the beginning of the Israel-Hamas war in October 2023. The charity has often engaged in heated public disputes with the Jewish state, accusing the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) of purposefully targeting its workers with airstrikes — allegations that Jerusalem has adamantly rejected.
In April 2024, the IDF came under fire after it conducted airstrikes on a WCK vehicle convoy, killing seven employees of the charity. Israel acknowledged responsibility for the incident and insisted that the airstrikes violated internal protocol, subsequently dismissing two senior officers over the botched military operation.
Israel has accused WCK of insufficiently vetting its workforce and employing terrorist members within its ranks.
Last month, WCK fired at least 62 of its staff members in Gaza after Israel said they had “affiliations and direct connections” with terrorist groups. Israel conducted an investigation into the backgrounds of the charity’s employees after the Jewish state discovered that a WCK employee named Ahed Azmi Qdeih took part in the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas’s invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
Qdeih was killed in an Israeli airstrike in Gaza on Nov. 30. At the time, WCK said it had no knowledge of an employee involved in the Oct. 7 onslaught, in which Hamas-led Palestinian terrorists murdered 1,200 people and kidnapped over 250 hostages during their rampage in southern Israel.
Israel has long insisted that Hamas and similar terrorist groups have infiltrated humanitarian organizations in Gaza. In August 2024, the United Nations admitted that nine employees of UNRWA, the controversial United Nations agency responsible for Palestinian refugees and their descendants, were fired over their alleged involvement in the Hamas terrorist group’s Oct. 7 attacks on southern Israel.
Andres responded to Trump’s statement on X/Twitter, claiming that he had already resigned.
“I submitted my resignation last week … my 2 year term was already up,” Andres wrote.
“I was honored to serve as co-chair of the President’s Council on Sports, Fitness, and Nutrition. My fellow council members — unpaid volunteers like me — were hardworking, talented people who inspired me every day. I’m proud of what we accomplished on behalf of the American people,” he added.
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