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Israel Has the Legal Right — and Moral Responsibility — to Protect Itself From Terrorism and Jihadi Warfare
Greta Thunberg and UN special rapporteur Francesca Albanese in an embrace with a Hamas terrorist in the artwork “Human Shields” by AleXsandro Palombo. Photo: Provided
In legal terms, intentional acts of injustice call for self-protection. Now faced with multiplying jihadi foes, the State of Israel has a corollary obligation to punish terrorist offenders.
It’s vital to note that a basic difference exists between terror violence (the crime) and Israel’s military response (the punishment). As a matter of international justice, this core difference is legally determinative and politically important.
There are pertinent details. By definition, terrorism is a crime under international law. A vulnerable state’s self-protective actions against terror crimes are law-enforcing. This assessment holds true as long as the terror-beleaguered state (here, Israel) responds with aptly-measured uses of force; i.e. — measures consistent with the codified and customary limitations of humanitarian international law.
During the Gaza War, some argued that the number of Palestinian deaths meant Israel violated the principles of distinction, proportionality, and military necessity. That is not true.
Whether Israel is operating against Shiite Hezbollah in Lebanon, Sunni Hamas in Gaza, or any other jihadi fighting forces based in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, etc., its operations intend to serve legitimate military objectives with minimum civilian harms.
To be sure, noncombatant harm can never be prevented altogether, especially when a perfidious enemy is hiding behind “human shields,” but Jerusalem does what it reasonably can do to keep collateral harms in check. Jerusalem — unlike its Islamist foes — displays no “criminal intent” (mens rea).
There is more. In its law-enforcing wars against jihadist terror, Israel acts on behalf of all law-observant countries. While this point has been difficult to acknowledge by those who focus only on the tangible effects of Israeli counter-terrorism, it is authoritatively supported by long-established global obligations. These are indispensable obligations of “mutual aid.”
By this fundamental principle, each state is required to assist other states imperiled by terror-violence. The most important historical figures in creating and explaining this requirement were Swiss jurist Emmerich de Vattel (The Law of Nations, 1758) and English jurist William Blackstone (Commentaries on the Laws of England, 1765-1769). Subsequently, Blackstone’s Commentaries became the recognizable foundation of US criminal law.
The Palestinian terror crimes of October 7, 2023 — murder, rape, and hostage-taking — represent “Nuremberg-level” violations of humanitarian international law. Under compelling or “jus cogens” rules, all states — not just Israel — have a many-sided obligation to punish such criminals. Jurisprudentially, this obligation is “sacred;” it can never be diminished or removed for geo-political or “practical” reasons.
Principle 1 of The Nuremberg Principles (1950) stipulates unambiguously, “No crime without a punishment.”
Among other conclusions, there would have been no Gaza War and no Palestinian casualties if Hamas had not launched its October 7, 2023, criminal assault and war against Israelis and nationals of other assorted states.
What about Israeli “proportionality”? Under binding laws of war, and contrary to “common-sense” meanings, proportionality has nothing to do with inflicting symmetrical or equivalent harms.
Instead, it derives from a more basic legal principle, namely that belligerent rights always have variously specific limitations. If a “common-sense” definition of proportionality was authentically law-based, then America would have been the principal aggressor during World War II.
Unlike Israel, which expressly laments the collateral damage of its self-defense operations in Gaza and elsewhere, jihadi rocket fire and terror attacks are the relentless product of “criminal intent.” By unhidden design, jihadists aim to maim and kill Israeli noncombatants. In Jerusalem, this overtly criminal aim should now be re-imagined in tandem with growing jihadi access to drone weapons and incrementally/eventually to weapons of mass destruction.
It’s time for further legal details. Deception can be lawful in armed conflict, but Hague Regulations disallow placement of military assets or personnel in civilian areas. Related prohibitions of “perfidy” can be found at Protocol I of 1977, additional to the Geneva Conventions of August 12, 1949. These rules are also binding on the basis of customary international law.
All anti-Israel combatants, including Palestinian insurgents alleging fighting for “self-determination,” are bound by the law of war. Among other things, this basic requirement can be found at Article 3, common to the four Geneva Conventions of 1949. It can never be suspended or abrogated. Israel, too, is bound by the law of war, but its Gaza War actions that killed and injured Palestinian civilians did not violate those laws.
There is something markedly ironic. The alleged jihadi goal of Palestinian “self-determination” is founded on an intended crime — that is, total “removal” of the Jewish State by attrition and annihilation. This explicitly genocidal orientation has its origins in the PLO’s “Phased Plan” of June 9, 1974.
In its 12th Session, the PLO’s highest deliberative body, the Palestinian National Council, reiterated the terror-organization’s aim “to achieve their rights to return, and to self-determination on the whole of their homeland.”
In its 1974 plan, a clarifying sequence of Palestinian violence was specifically identified “…to start a Pan-Arab War to complete the liberation of the all-Palestinian territory” (Art. 8). Ironically, this was and still remains the annihilationist plan of more mainstream Palestinian terror groups than Hamas.
At some still-indecipherable point, Hamas or other jihadi criminal forces could launch mega-terror attacks on Israel. Such potentially “perfidious” aggressions could include chemical, biological, or radiological (radiation-dispersal) weapons. Foreseeable perils could also include a non-nuclear terrorist attack on the Israeli nuclear reactor at Dimona. There is already a documented history of enemy assaults against this plutonium-production facility, both by a state (Iraq, in 1991) and by a Palestinian terror group (Hamas, in 2014).
International law is not a suicide pact. When jihadists celebrate the explosive “martyrdom” of manipulated Islamic civilians and when Islamist leaders seek “redemption” (i.e., “power over death”) through the mass-murder of “Jews,” the wrongdoers have no correct claims to immunity from law-based punishment.
Under international law, terrorists are considered hostes humani generis or “common enemies of humankind.” Among other things, this most egregious category of criminality invites punishment wherever the wrongdoers can be found. Concerning their required arrest and prosecution, all pertinent jurisdiction is “universal.”
What next? In all law, truth is exculpatory. Regarding the Gaza War, that conflict is anything but over. Hamas and other jihadist forces are already rearming and President Trump’s so-called international stabilization force is effectively a protracted cover for Israel’s jihadi enemies. Taken as a whole, the American president’s “peace” is merely a bitter self-parody.
In the end, Hamas and other jihadists argue they are fighting a “just war” and entitled to employ “any means necessary.” Under authoritative international law, however, even if a war is determinedly “just,” it must still be fought with determinedly “just means.” In this binding jurisprudence, ends can never justify means. Under no circumstances can there ever be law-based justifications for terror-violence.
We should recall 18th century Swiss scholar Emmerich de Vattel’s still-valid declaration in The Law of Nations: “An intentional act of injustice is an injury. A nation has therefore the right to punish it. … This right … is derived from the right of self-protection.”
Prof. 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, Prof. Beres was Chair of Project Daniel (PM Sharon). His 12th and latest book is Surviving Amid Chaos: Israel’s Nuclear Strategy (Rowman & Littlefield, 2016; 2nd ed., 2018).
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Nobel Laureate Mohammadi in Iran Hospital After ‘Cardiac Crisis,’ Foundation Says
A picture of Nobel Peace Prize winner Narges Mohammadi on the wall of the Grand Hotel in central Oslo before the Nobel banquet, in connection with the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize 2023, in Oslo, Norway December 10, 2023. Photo: NTB/Javad Parsa via REUTERS/File Photo
Nobel Peace Prize winner Narges Mohammadi was in an unstable condition in an Iranian hospital on Saturday after she was taken there from prison following a catastrophic deterioration of her health, a foundation run by her family said.
The secretary of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, which awarded Mohammadi the 2023 prize, had expressed concern on Thursday that the condition of the Iranian human rights activist was worsening after she had suffered a heart attack in prison.
Mohammadi, in her 50s, won the prize while in prison for her campaign to advance women’s rights and abolish the death penalty in Iran.
The Narges Mohammadi Foundation said in a statement on its website on Friday that she had been “urgently transferred to a hospital in Zanjan today following a catastrophic deterioration of her health, including two episodes of complete loss of consciousness and a severe cardiac crisis.”
This transfer was an “unavoidable necessity after prison doctors determined her condition could not be managed on-site,” it said.
In an update on Saturday, the foundation said she remained in an unstable condition receiving oxygen. It called for her to be transferred to a hospital in Tehran for tests and specialized treatment.
Reuters could not independently confirm her condition.
Mohammadi was sentenced to a new prison term of 7-1/2 years, the foundation said in February, weeks before the US and Israel launched their war against Iran. The Nobel committee at the time called on Tehran to free her immediately.
She was arrested in December after denouncing the death of a lawyer, Khosrow Alikordi; prosecutor Hasan Hematifar told reporters then she had made provocative remarks at Alikordi’s memorial ceremony.
On Friday morning, Mohammadi fainted after days of dangerously high blood pressure and severe nausea, the foundation said. After multiple bouts of vomiting, she blacked out and was moved to the prison medical unit for emergency intravenous fluids.
The activist, who has undergone three angioplasty procedures, faces a “direct and immediate” threat to her right to life, her family said. “We call for all charges to be dropped immediately and for all sentences imposed for her peaceful human rights work to be unconditionally annulled.”
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Is supporting peace illegal in Israel? A shocking arrest carries a warning
A Jewish man is wearing his kippah at a local café when an angry customer accosts him. The kippah is against the law, the man is told; the other customer calls the police.
Within minutes, officers arrive. They confiscate the Jewish man’s belongings, and place him in a cell without water for around 20 minutes. He is not allowed to call his wife. Near release, the officers threaten to put him back in the cell if he does not leave the station without his kippah.
The man refuses. And so an officer of the law takes a blade to the man’s sacred religious symbol. “She’d taken my possession, a religious ritual object, something that is very dear to my heart, and destroyed it,” the man said.
This was not Europe in the 1930s. It was Israel in 2026. And it all happened because Alex Sinclair, 53, had a Palestinian flag embroidered onto his kippah.
That Sinclair is a Zionist — his kippah also featured an Israeli flag — meant little to his fellow citizen, or to the police, who have taken an increasingly authoritarian tack against Palestinian symbols.
Israeli censorship of innocuous political expression isn’t new, especially for Palestinian citizens of Israel. But the egregious case of a Palestinian flag being cut off of Sinclair’s kippah shows the predictable consequences for Jews of policies that repress others’ speech in our name. A government that lets officers cut a Jew’s kippah is taking a page out of the playbook of antisemites by defining what it means to be a good Jew who gets to live freely in society
A kippah built for complexity
Sinclair is a Jewish education lecturer at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His 2013 book Loving the Real Israel: An Educational Agenda for Liberal Zionism — a finalist for a National Jewish Book Award — argues that Jewish education should be built around principles including complexity, conversation and empowerment.
He has spent his career insisting that you can love a country honestly only if you confront its flaws. As part of that effort, he has worn a kippah bearing both an Israeli and a Palestinian flag for nearly 20 years.
“The reasons behind the kippah are long and complex,” he wrote on Facebook after his detention, “and related to the messy ambivalence of my Jewish-Zionist identity.”
The kippah was, in part, his way of expressing his religious commitment without being folded into assumptions about what a kippah-wearing Jew stands for politically.
His wearing of it has sometimes sparked meaningful reactions from other Israelis, especially Palestinians. Once, a cashier in Sinclair’s neighborhood supermarket told him: “Thank you on behalf of all of us.” Another time, the mechanic fixing his flat tire saw the kippah and burst into tears. Among Jews, the kippah acts as necessary friction in a country sometimes desperate to maintain a smooth narrative.
In a 2024 essay called “The Two Most Important Flags for Liberal Jews Today,” Sinclair argued that the dual flags answer extremism from both Hamas and the Israeli right:
“By portraying the Israeli flag and the Palestinian flag together, we show Hamas and other Palestinian terrorists that we will not give up our country and our national identity, but we show potential Palestinian partners that we accept their national identity and wish to live in security, mutual dignity, and peace with them.”
Cutting the Palestinian flag out of Sinclair’s kippah was the state literally cutting complexity out of acceptable Jewish vocabulary.
The gap between what the law is and what it does
What happened to Sinclair was not a case of bad laws so much as police taking matters into their own hands despite the law.
No Knesset law makes the Palestinian flag illegal in Israel. Israeli legal authorities and courts have repeatedly affirmed the Palestinian flag as protected political expression, while allowing police only narrow authority in cases where there is a high probability of a breach of the peace or genuine suspicion that someone identifies with or supports a terrorist organization
Israel once used the power of the state to discipline Jewish radicals. The country’s first anti-terror law, passed in 1948, was directed at Jews. It was used to designate Lehi, a Jewish paramilitary group that assassinated United Nations mediator Folke Bernadotte because his proposed partition plan was seen as too favorable to Arabs. (This despite the fact that the Swedish nobleman’s “White Buses” operations rescued tens of thousands of prisoners, including Jews, from Nazi camps in 1945.)
Now, police contorted the statutory tradition descended from that law against a Jew for the peaceful connotations of his kippah. Politicians and law enforcement whose beliefs are arguably influenced by extremists like Lehi are abusing their power to harass peaceful citizens of the state.
Foremost among them is National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir. In January 2023, days after being sworn in, Ben-Gvir directed the Israeli police to remove “terror-supporting flags” from public spaces — a directive that in practice included the Palestinian flag. Senior police commanders quickly said that the order was not legally sound. None of that has stopped censorship from happening.
The legal-rights organization Adalah has documented at least 645 people arrested for speech-related offenses since the Hamas attack of Oct. 7, 2023. The overwhelming majority of that number are Palestinian citizens of Israel, many of whom were eventually indicted. By contrast, human rights organization Yesh Din has found that nearly 94% of investigations into settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank have been closed without indictments.
There was never going to be a firewall
It was always naïve to assume that the coercive apparatus used against Palestinians could be cordoned off from the democracy Jews live in.
Unchecked power, as critics like the Orthodox Jewish philosopher Yeshayahu Leibowitz warned, corrodes everything it touches. A state’s abuses undermine democracy for the citizens in whose name they are carried out.
The Israeli right may object that Hamas and its supporters have used the Palestinian flag in hateful contexts, including in imagery surrounding the Oct. 7 massacre and at rallies celebrating Hamas’s attack. (Hamas has its own, separate flag). That’s true, and it helps explain why many Israelis experience the Palestinian flag as threatening.
But just as the Israeli flag does not mean that every Jew who flies it endorses every action of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the Palestinian flag does not mean that every Palestinian who waves it endorses Hamas. Flags, and nations, contain multitudes. Many Palestinians wave their flag out of a sincere desire for self-determination.
“I, like every Israeli, know people who lost loved ones on Oct. 7 or in the war thereafter,” Sinclair himself said. “Hamas is my enemy: an enemy who seeks my destruction, an enemy who is not interested in coexistence.” His kippah does not pretend otherwise.
If officers had cut a Jew’s kippah in any other country in the world, Israeli MK Gilad Kariv noted last week, “there would have been an uproar here in Israel.” He’s right.
Instead, the Israeli police have publicly described what they did to Alex Sinclair as a “clarification process.” That sounds like the bureaucratic vocabulary of a state that no longer trusts its citizens to exercise their rights and liberties. Following his detention, Sinclair filed a complaint with the Department for Internal Police Investigations. He requested compensation for the kippah and a written commitment that he could walk through Modiin without harassment.
“I’m not holding my breath,” he said.
His assessment is haunting: “If we are looking ahead, oh my God, is this what is in store for us?” The answer, if things continue along these lines, is a government that is increasingly authoritarian, deeply insecure and farcical. Days after Sinclair’s detention, Israeli police seized another suspect flag that was red, green, and white at an anti-Netanyahu protest. It was Hungarian.
The post Is supporting peace illegal in Israel? A shocking arrest carries a warning appeared first on The Forward.
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Iran Expected to Ramp Up Chemical, Biological Weapons Programs
Symbolic mock-ups of Iranian missiles are displayed on a street, amid the US-Israeli conflict with Iran, in Tehran, Iran, March 22, 2026. Photo: Majid Asgaripour/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS
Amid sustained international scrutiny of Iran’s nuclear program, missile development, and regional proxy network, new assessments point to a quieter and more troubling front as allegations grow that Tehran may be expanding work related to chemical and biological weapons capabilities.
According to a new report from the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies at Bar-Ilan University in Israel, the Islamist regime in Iran may be advancing efforts to significantly develop its chemical and biological weapons programs — a move experts warn would pose serious risks not only to Israel but also to the wider region and the Iranian population itself.
Iran’s chemical and biological research programs allegedly focus on a range of toxic agents, including blister agents like mustard gas, nerve agents such as sarin and Novichok, and substances that attack the lungs or blood and can cause suffocation.
These reportedly also include biological threats such as anthrax, ricin, and botulinum toxins, as well as certain viruses, all of which can cause severe illness or death by disrupting the body’s nervous system, organs, or immune response.
Israeli officials have previously warned that the Iranian government has been developing dual-use chemicals, with both civilian and military applications, and may be channeling them to its regional proxy terrorist forces, raising fears they could be used to intensify proxy conflicts and destabilize the wider Middle East.
Tehran is also suspected of having used such agents to help suppress the nationwide anti-government protests earlier this year, which were violently crushed by security forces in a crackdown that left tens of thousands of demonstrators tortured, imprisoned, or killed.
Similar allegations have repeatedly emerged in the past, adding to a wider pattern of reported abuses against civilians and violations of human rights.
According to a report from Iran International, a medical staff member in Karaj said some detainees released during the January protests had reported body aches, lethargy, weakness, loss of appetite, nausea, and vomiting — all symptoms that may indicate possible drug-related poisoning.
Iran first began developing chemical weapons-related capabilities in the 1980s. In recent years, those efforts have reportedly evolved to include pharmaceutical-based agents and other compounds designed for incapacitation or riot control.
US government assessments have indicated for decades that Iran has been researching and developing chemical agents, including anesthetic compounds designed to incapacitate individuals by targeting the central nervous system.
These reports point to Iran’s academic sector playing a key role in this area, with Imam Hossein University and Malek Ashtar University of Technology — military-linked institutions associated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and the Ministry of Defense — reportedly conducting research since at least 2005 into chemical agents designed for incapacitation.
Since the start of the war earlier this year, the Israeli Air Force has carried out sustained strikes targeting sites linked to chemical weapons research, development, and production, aiming to disrupt facilities embedded within Iran’s broader military-industrial infrastructure and associated pharmaceutical-based programs.
Even though Tehran has long denied pursuing chemical or biological weapons and remains a party to the Chemical Weapons Convention, Western governments continue to accuse the regime of violating international norms.