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What the Law Actually Says About Targeting Jihadist Terrorists
Explosions take place on the deck of the Greek-flagged oil tanker Sounion on the Red Sea, in this handout picture released Aug. 29, 2024. Photo: Houthi Military Media/Handout via REUTERS
During the coming year, the United States, in occasional concert with Israel, must confront expanding terrorist threats. Topping pertinent concerns in Washington and Jerusalem will be an assortment of jihadi groups, some spawned by the al-Assad regime collapse in Syria and some by coinciding reconfigurations of Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, and Houthi criminals. Also predictable are (1) strengthened and dispersed Fatah units beyond Judea/Samaria (West Bank); and (2) variously lethal synergies between criminal terrorist organizations that include al-Qaeda and ISIS remnants.
Under the protective tutelage of an American president, “We the People” are entitled to expect basic safety in world politics. At a minimum, we should all be able to assume that wider and consistently capable circles of public authority remain poised to thwart terror attacks.
In terms of United States law, the authoritative roots of core security assurances go back to 17th century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes. Though likely unfamiliar to America’s current president and his senior defense advisors, Hobbes’ Leviathan was integral to the political thought of Thomas Jefferson. The erudite author of the Declaration was widely read by all categories of educated persons.
Regarding US counterterrorist preparation, America’s national security establishment must get ready for all contingencies, most plainly jihadi terrorists who seek “martyrdom.” This includes fashioning conceptual foundations for future Osama Bin-Laden “elimination-type” operations.
During the Obama years, one conspicuously major targeted killing of a jihadi terrorist was the September 2011 US drone-assassination of Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen. That case was notably “special” in one generally overlooked or underestimated aspect: Jihadi al-Alwaki was born in New Mexico, and was therefore a US citizen. At the same time, despite the US Constitution’s Fifth Amendment protections regarding “due process,” it represented a tactical option that could sometime need to be repeated.
Here, a presumptively effective tactic would simultaneously undermine American law and justice.
What should be decided in Washington? Each and every trade-off option would be injurious. Even if we take with utmost seriousness Cicero’s reasonable injunction (“The safety of the people shall be the highest law”), it’s not clear which operational choices would best serve such indispensable “safety?”
What precise legal guidelines should Americans follow in these settings?
To respond properly, Trump and his designated counselors will need to inquire: “Is it sufficiently legal to target and kill jihadi terrorists if precise linkages between prospective targets and discernible attack intentions can be documented?”
To meaningfully answer this critical question, it will first be necessary for Trump’s national security officials to ask whether a proposed terrorist killing plan would be gainfully preemptive or just narrowly retributive. If the latter, a judgment wherein national self-defense was not in any way the underlying operational rationale, authoritative determinations of legality could become more problematic. It would not be sensible to launch risky defensive actions against terrorist adversaries solely because these actions could meet jurisprudential standards.
It gets even more complicated.
Assassination is explicitly prohibited by US law. (See Exec. Order No. 12333, 3 C.F.R. 200 (1988), reprinted in 50 U.S.C. Sec. 401 (1988)). Generally, it is also a crime under international law, which, though not widely understood, is part of American domestic law.
Still, at least in certain more-or-less residual circumstances, the targeted killing of jihadi terrorist leaders could be correctly excluded from ordinarily prohibited behaviors. Accordingly, such peremptorily protective actions could still be defended as permissible expressions of national law-enforcement.
A similar defense could sometimes be applied to the considered killing of terrorist “rank-and-file,” especially where such selective lethality had become part of an already-ongoing pattern of US counter-terrorism. Earlier, for example, the United States widened the scope of its permissible terrorist targeting in parts of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria. This widened arc of permissibility — one which now modifies more stringent rules of engagement concerning human target identification — represented a byproduct of continuously developing drone technologies.
In the best of all possible worlds, there would be no need for any decentralized or “vigilante” expressions of international justice. Obviously, we don’t yet live in such an ideal world. Instead, enduring uneasily in an historically anarchic world order- – a context that international law professors prefer to call “Westphalian.”
At some still-indeterminable point, terrorist escalations could lead to instances of chemical, biological or nuclear attack. These unprecedented attacks (ones that are sui generis in law) might be undertaken by assorted sub-state adversaries or by certain “hybrid” combinations of state and sub-state foes. Ironically, in the policies of US ally Israel, dominant concerns have centered on Iran-Hezbollah and Iran/Hamas combinations. Here, an evident irony stems from the fact that one Iranian surrogate (Hezbollah) is Shiite while the other (Hamas) is Sunni.
In our persistently anarchic and prospectively chaotic world legal system, assorted jihadi leaders are already responsible for the mass killing of noncombatant men, women, and children of many different nationalities. It follows that wherever such leaders are not suitably “terminated” by the United States or Israel in the tumultuous Middle East, egregious terror crimes will almost certainly continue and be left unpunished.
Any impunity would be inconsistent with the universal legal obligation to punish international crimes, a jus cogens or peremptory obligation reaffirmed at the original Nuremberg Tribunal and in the subsequent Nuremberg Principles.
Inevitably, complex considerations of law and tactics will intersect and inter-penetrate. In this connection, the glaring indiscriminacy of most jihadist operations is rarely if ever the result of adversarial inadvertence. Typically, it is the intentional outcome of violent terrorist inclinations, unambiguously murderous ideals that lay embedded in the jihadist terrorist leader’s operative views of insurgency.
For jihadists, there can never be meaningful distinctions between civilians and non-civilians, between innocents and non-innocents. For these active or latent terrorist murderers, all that really matters are unassailably immutable distinctions between Muslims, “apostates” and “unbelievers.”
As for the apostates and unbelievers, it’s quite simple. Their lives, believe the jihadists, have no value. Prima facie, they have no immunizing sanctity. In law, both international and national, every government has the right and obligation to protect its citizens against external harms.
Usually, assassination is a certifiable crime under international law. Yet, in our essentially decentralized system of world law, extraordinary self-help by individual states is often necessary, and more-then-occasionally the only real alternative to passively sufferance of terror crimes. In the absence of particular targeted killings, terrorists would continue to create havoc against defenseless civilians almost anywhere of their choosing and with unjust impunity.
A basic difficulty is that jihadi terror criminals are usually immune to the more orthodox legal expectations of extradition and prosecution (aut dedere, aut judicare). This is not to suggest that the targeted killing of terrorists will always “work” — there is literally nothing to support the logic of any such suggestion — but only that disallowing such killing ex ante might not be operationally gainful or legally just.
If carried out with aptly due regard for pertinent “rules,” targeting terrorist leaders could remain consistent with the ancient legal principle of Nullum crimen sine poena, “No crime without a punishment.” Earlier, this original principle of justice had been cited as a dominant rationale for both the Tokyo and Nuremberg war crime tribunals. Subsequently, it was incorporated into customary international law, an authoritative source of law identified inter alia at Article 38 of the Statute of the International Court of Justice.
By both the codified and customary standards of contemporary international law, all terrorists are hostes humani generis, or “common enemies of humankind.” Still, choosing precisely which terrorists ought to be targeted remains a largely ideological rather than jurisprudential matter.
Overall, in his consideration of assassination or targeted-killing as counter-terrorism, President Trump should consider the clarifying position of 18th century Swiss scholar Emmerich de Vattel in his most famous work, The Law of Nations, or the Principles of Natural Law (1758): “The safest plan is to prevent evil where that is possible. A Nation has the right to resist the injury another seeks to inflict upon it, and to use force and every other just means of resistance against the aggressor.”
Even earlier, the right of self-defense by forestalling an attack had been asserted by the foundational Dutch scholar, Hugo Grotius, in Book II of The Law of War and Peace (1625). Recognizing the need for what later jurisprudence would reference as threatening international behavior that is “imminent in point of time,” Grotius indicated that self-defense must be permitted not only after an attack has already been suffered, but also in advance, where “the deed may be anticipated.”
Further on, in the same chapter, Grotius summarized: “It be lawful to kill him who is preparing to kill.” Interestingly, Vattel, Pufendorf and Grotius were all taken into primary account by Thomas Jefferson in the American Declaration of Independence.
International law is not a suicide pact. “Where the ordinary remedy fails, recourse must be had to an extraordinary one.”
Donald Trump is obligated to comply with the rules and procedures of humanitarian international law, yet he must also bear in mind that jihadist enemies will remain unaffected by these or any other jurisprudential expectations. Assassination and broader forms of preemption may sometimes be not only allowable under binding international law, but indispensable.
Conversely, there are occasions when strategies of assassination could be determinedly legal but be operationally ineffectual. Recalling the close connections between international law and US law — connections that extend to direct and literal forms of “incorporation” – -an American president can never choose to dismiss the law of war on grounds that it is “merely international.”Always, President Trump should consider decipherable connections between targeted killings, counter-terrorism, and United States Constitutional Law.
Under US law, we are bound to inquire, should an American president ever be authorized to order the extra-judicial killing of a United States citizen — even one deemed an “enemy combatant” — without meaningful reference to “due process of law?” On its face, any affirmative response to this query would be difficult to defend under the US Constitution.
Operational approval would need to be based upon a reasonably presumed high urgency of terror threat. Any such allegedly “authorized” targeted killing of US citizens would express potentially irremediable tension between indissoluble citizen rights and peremptory requirements of public safety. Going forward with obligatory counter terrorist preparations, the US president will need to keep this firmly in mind.
US policy on assassination or targeted killing will have to reflect a very delicate balance. Most important, in any such calculation, will be the protection of civilian populations from jihadist terror-inflicted harms. In those circumstances where harms would involve unconventional weapons of any sort — chemical, biological or nuclear — the legal propriety of targeting jihadists could be patently obvious (per Cicero, above) and “beyond reasonable doubt.”
In sum, for both the United States and Israel, legal assessments of targeted killing ought never be undertaken apart from correlative operational expectations. This means that before any “extraordinary remedies” should be applied, these measures would be not only legally correct, but tactically cost-effective. In the end, as we may finally be reminded by Cicero in The Laws, “The safety of the people shall be the highest law.”
Louis René Beres, Emeritus Professor of International Law at Purdue, is the author of many books and articles dealing with nuclear strategy and nuclear war, including Apocalypse: Nuclear Catastrophe in World Politics (University of Chicago Press, 1980) and Security or Armageddon: Israel’s Nuclear Strategy (D.C. Heath/Lexington, 1986). His twelfth book, Surviving Amid Chaos: Israel’s Nuclear Strategy, was published by Rowman and Littlefield in 2016. A version of this article was originally published by Jewish Business News.
The post What the Law Actually Says About Targeting Jihadist Terrorists first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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‘Valid For All Countries Except Israel’
US passport. Photo: Pixabay.
JNS.org – There’s an unwritten rule among governments in many Muslim countries—when things go wrong at home, turn on the State of Israel.
Bangladesh, one of the poorest and most densely populated countries in Asia, provides the latest example of this tactic. Last week, the authorities in Dhaka announced that they were reintroducing what is essentially a disclaimer on the passports issued to its citizens: “Valid for all countries except Israel.” That shameful inscription was abandoned in 2021 by the government of recently ousted Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, although it was never followed up with diplomatic outreach to Israel, much less recognition of the Jewish state’s right to a peaceful and sovereign existence.
The rationale for the move in 2021 was that Bangladeshi passports had to be brought up to date with international standards. However, the war in the Gaza Strip triggered by the Hamas pogrom in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, has apparently canceled out that imperative.
“For many years, our passports carried the ‘except Israel’ clause. But the previous government suddenly removed it,” Brig. Gen. Mohammad Nurus Salam, passports director at the Department of Immigration, told the Arab News. Somewhat disingenuously, he added: “We were used to seeing ‘except Israel’ written in our passports. I don’t know why they took it out. If you talk to people across the country, you’ll see they want that line back in their passports. There was no need to remove it.”
It’s been 25 years since I was in Bangladesh, where I spent several months as a BBC consultant assisting with the launch of the country’s first private TV news station. One of the aspects that struck me profoundly—in contrast to Salam’s claim that the people want their passports to preclude travel to Israel—was the lack of hostility towards Israel among the many Bangladeshis I met and worked with, and I have no reason to believe that this attitude has fundamentally shifted. Most Bangladeshis are consumed by their own country’s vast problems, and the distant Israeli-Palestinian conflict does not impinge in any way on the resolution of those.
When I told people that I was Jewish, had family in Israel and had spent a great deal of time there, the most common response was curiosity. For the great majority, I was the first Jew they had ever met, and they eagerly quizzed me about the Jewish religion, often noting the overlaps with Islamic practices, such as circumcision and the prohibition on consuming pork.
“What is Israel like? What are the people like?” was a conversation I engaged in on more than one occasion. I remember with great affection a journalist called Salman, a devout Muslim who invited me to his home for an iftar meal during Ramadan. Salman was convinced that there were still a couple of Jews living in Bangladesh, and he combed Dhaka trying to find them so that he could introduce me (he never succeeded because there were no Jews there, but I appreciated his efforts.) I also remember members of the Hindu community, who compose about 8% of the population, drawing positive comparisons between Bangladesh’s Indian-backed 1971 War of Independence against Muslim Pakistan and Israel’s own War of Independence in 1947-48.
To understand why Bangladesh has taken this regressive decision requires a hard look at its domestic politics. In August of last year, the government of Sheikh Hasina—the daughter of independence leader Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and the dominant political figure over the past 30 years—was overthrown following a wave of protest against its well-documented corruption, discriminatory practices and judicial interference. Her downfall was accompanied by a surge of sectarian violence against Hindu homes, businesses and temples, with more than 2,000 incidents recorded over a two-week period. In the eyes of many, Hindus were associated with Sheikh Hasina’s Awami League Party, and the violence against them suggested that Islamist positions were making headway in a country that flew the banner of secular nationalism in its bid to win freedom from Pakistani rule.
The passport decision can be viewed in a similar light: Bangladesh asserting its identity as a Muslim country standing in solidarity with the Palestinians, the Islamic world’s pre-eminent cause, at the same time as breaking with the legacy of Sheikh Hasina’s rule. Yet that stance will not alleviate the fiscal misery of Bangladeshi citizens, with more than one in four people living below the poverty line. Nor will it address the chronic infrastructure problems that plague the country’s foreign trade, or tackle the bureaucracy and red tape that crushes entrepreneurship and innovation.
In short, supporting the Palestinians brings no material benefits for ordinary Bangladeshis, who would doubtless gain from a genuine relationship with Israel that would introduce, among many other advantages, more efficient water technology to counter the presence of arsenic and the lack of sanitation that often renders Bangladesh’s large reserves of water unusable and undrinkable.
Even so, ideology and Muslim identity may not be the only explanations for the Bangladeshi decision. It can also be seen as a gesture towards Qatar, the wealthiest country in the Islamic world, which has artfully cultivated trade and diplomatic ties with a slew of less developed countries, Bangladesh included. Last year, Qatar’s ruler, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani, paid a two-day state to Bangladesh that showcased Doha’s contributions in the form of bilateral trade worth $3 billion as well as millions of dollars in Qatari grants for school and higher education. Such largesse on the part of the Qataris is a critical means of ensuring that governments in Bangladesh and other Muslim nations stay away from the Abraham Accords countries that have made a peace of sorts with Israel.
Bangladesh is not, of course, the only country to prevent its citizens from traveling to Israel or denying entry to Israeli passport holders. A few days after the Bangladeshi decision, the Maldives—another Muslim country that enjoys close relations with Qatar—announced that Israelis would no longer be permitted to visit. None of these bans is likely to be lifted as long as Israel is at war with the Hamas terrorists in Gaza, Iran’s regional proxies and the Iranian regime itself.
The ripple effects of that war—antisemitic violence in Western countries, cold-shouldering of Israel by countries without a direct stake in the conflict—will continue to be felt. None of that changes the plain fact that this remains a war that Israel must win.
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US, Iran Set for Second Round of Nuclear Talks as Iranian FM Warns Against ‘Unrealistic Demands’
Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi attends a press conference following a meeting with Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in Moscow, Russia, April 18, 2025. Tatyana Makeyeva/Pool via REUTERS
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said a deal could be reached during Saturday’s second round of nuclear negotiations in Rome if the United States does not make “unrealistic demands.”
In a joint press conference with his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, Araghchi said that Washington showed “partial seriousness” during the first round of nuclear talks in Oman last week.
The Iranian top diplomat traveled to Moscow on Thursday to deliver a letter from Iran’s so-called Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, briefing Russian President Vladimir Putin on the ongoing nuclear talks with the White House.
“Their willingness to enter serious negotiations that address the nuclear issue only, without entering into other issues, can lead us towards constructive negotiations,” Araghchi said during the joint press conference in Moscow on Friday.
“As I have said before, if unreasonable, unrealistic and impractical demands are not made, an agreement is possible,” he continued.
Tehran has previously rejected halting its uranium enrichment program, insisting that the country’s right to enrich uranium is non-negotiable, despite Washington’s threats of military actions, additional sanctions, and tariffs if an agreement is not reached to curb the country’s nuclear activities.
On Tuesday, US special envoy Steve Witkoff said that any deal with Iran must require the complete dismantling of its “nuclear enrichment and weaponization program” — reversing his earlier comments, in which he indicated that the White House would allow Tehran to enrich uranium to a 3.67 percent threshold for a “civil nuclear program.”
During the press conference, Araghchi also announced he would attend Saturday’s talks in Rome, explaining that negotiations with the US are being held indirectly due to recent threats and US President Donald Trump’s “maximum pressure” campaign against Tehran — which aims to cut the country’s crude exports to zero and prevent it from obtaining a nuclear weapon.
“Indirect negotiations are not something weird and an agreement is within reach through this method,” Araghchi said.
He also indicated that Iran expects Russia to play a role in any potential agreement with Washington, noting that the two countries have held frequent and close consultations on Tehran’s nuclear program in the past.
“We hope Russia will play a role in a possible deal,” Araghchi said during the press conference.
As an increasingly close ally of Iran, Moscow could play a crucial role in Tehran’s nuclear negotiations with the West, leveraging its position as a veto-wielding member of the UN Security Council and a signatory to a now-defunct 2015 nuclear deal that imposed limits on the Iranian nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief.
Known formally as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), Trump withdrew the US from the deal in 2018.
Since then, even though Tehran has denied wanting to develop a nuclear weapon, the UN’s nuclear watchdog – the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) – has warned that Iran has “dramatically” accelerated uranium enrichment to up to 60 percent purity, close to the roughly 90 percent weapons-grade level and enough to build six nuclear bombs.
During the press conference on Friday, Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov said that “Russia is ready to facilitate the negotiation process between Iran and the US regarding Tehran’s nuclear program.”
Moscow has previously said that any military strike against Iran would be “illegal and unacceptable.”
Russia’s diplomatic role in the ongoing negotiations could also be important, as the country has recently solidified its growing partnership with the Iranian regime.
On Wednesday, Russia’s upper house of parliament ratified a 20-year strategic partnership agreement with Iran, strengthening military ties between the two countries.
Despite Tehran’s claims that its nuclear program is solely for civilian purposes rather than weapon development, Western states have said there is no “credible civilian justification” for the country’s recent nuclear activity, arguing it “gives Iran the capability to rapidly produce sufficient fissile material for multiple nuclear weapons.”
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Reps. Dan Goldman and Chris Smith Issue Statement Condemning Shapiro Arson Attack As ‘Textbook Antisemitism’
Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro (D) holds a rally in support of US Vice President Kamala Harris’ Democratic presidential election campaign in Ambler, Pennsylvania, US, July 29, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Rachel Wisniewski
Rep. Dan Goldman (D-NY) and Rep. Chris Smith (D-NJ) issued a statement condemning the recent arson attack against Gov. Josh Shapiro (D-PA) as a form of “textbook antisemitism.”
“Governor Shapiro is the Governor of Pennsylvania and has nothing to do with Israel’s foreign policy, yet he was targeted as an American Jew by a radicalized extremist who blames the Governor for Israel’s actions. That is textbook antisemitism,” the statement read.
Shapiro’s residence, the Pennsylvania governor’s mansion, was set ablaze on Sunday morning, hours after the governor hosted a gathering to celebrate the first night of the Jewish holiday of Passover. Shapiro said that he, his wife, and his children were awakened by state troopers knocking on their door at 2 am. The governor and his family immediately evacuated the premises and were unscathed.
Goldman and Smith added that the arson attack against Shapiro serves as “a bitter reminder that persecution of Jews continues.” The duo claimed that they “strongly condemn this antisemitic violence” and called on the suspect to “be held accountable to the fullest extent of the law.”
Pennsylvania State Police said that the suspect, Cody Balmer set fire to Shapiro’s residence over the alleged ongoing “injustices to the people of Palestine” and Shapiro’s Jewish faith.
According to an arrest warrant, Balmer called 911 prior to the attack and told emergency operators that he “will not take part in [Shapiro’s] plans for what he wants to do to the Palestinian people,” and demanded that the governor “stop having my friends killed.”
The suspect continued, telling operators, “Our people have been put through too much by that monster.”
Balmer later revealed to police that he planned to beat Shapiro with a sledgehammer if he encountered him after gaining access into his residence, according to authorities.
He was subsequently charged with eight crimes by authorities, including serious felonies such as attempted homicide, terrorism, and arson. The suspect faces potentially 100 years in jail. He has been denied bail.
Shapiro, a practicing Jew, has positioned himself as a staunch supporter of Israel. In the days following Hamas’s brutal slaughter of roughly 1,200 people across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, Shapiro issued statements condemning the Palestinian terrorist group and gave a speech at a local synagogue. The governor also ordered the US and Pennsylvania Commonwealth flags to fly at half-mast outside the state capitol to honor the victims.
Shapiro’s strident support of the Jewish state in the wake of Oct. 7 also incensed many pro-Palestinian activists, resulting in the governor being dubbed “Genocide Josh” by far-left demonstrators.
US Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer (NY) chimed in on the arson attack Thursday, urging the Justice Department to launch a federal investigation, claiming that the incident could be motivated by antisemitism.
Schumer argued that the arson attack targeting Shapiro, who is Jewish, left the Pennsylvania governor’s family in “anguish” and warned that it could serve as an example of “rising antisemitic violence” within the United States. He stressed that a federal investigation and hate crime charges may be necessary to uphold the “fundamental values of religious freedom and public safety.”
Thus far, Shapiro has refused to blame the attack on antisemitism, despite the suspect’s alleged comments repudiating the governor over his support for Israel. The governor has stressed the importance of allowing prosecutors to determine whether the attack constitutes a hate crime.
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