Gaza Revisited

Justice depends not on the quantity of civilian casualties, but on the proportionality of their being killed.

I

The agony in Gaza continues, as Israel prepares to launch yet another military operation. I have written about this before, but not for some time. So, what do I think about it now? As the humanitarian crisis has deepened, have my views changed? The answer is mainly No, but somewhat Yes.

I have always argued that the killing of civilians or the massive number of casualties as such do not tell us whether what Israel is doing is right or wrong. I am not a pacifist. I think that sometimes wars, tragically, should be fought and won, notwithstanding their terrible costs. When it comes to judging the morality of embarking on a particular war and the means of fighting it, the ‘just war’ ethic provides the most sophisticated analytical apparatus available.

Let me explain.

II

In the course of its history, the ‘just war’ ethic has developed two sets of criteria. One governs the decision whether or not to go to war in the first place (ius ad bellum: ‘justice toward war’); the other, the conduct of war that has already been embarked upon (ius in bello: ‘justice in war’).^[i]

The basic criterion for going to war is that a ‘just cause’ obtains. According to the Christian tradition, this comprises an injustice that requires correcting. Here, then, ‘just war’ has the basic form of the defence or rescue of the innocent. The so-called doctrine of the ‘Responsibility to Protect’, which was articulated in the wake of atrocities in the Balkans during the 1990s and promoted by the Canadian government in the early 2000s, expresses this point of view. However, exponents of the contemporary philosophical tradition tend to assume a different position. Following post-1945 international law, they specify ‘just cause’ as an attack on a sovereign state that needs fending off. So, in their eyes, ‘just cause’ takes the form of national self-defence. I prefer the Christian version, not for dogmatic reasons, but because, arguably, the letter of international law would forbid military intervention to stop genocide within the borders of a sovereign state, if the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) could not agree to authorise it.

St. Augustine of Hippo, the father of the Christian just war tradition. Painted by Giuseppe Antonio Bianca, c. 1745.

Since war, however strongly justified, is invariably highly destructive and hazardous, it is not enough merely that there be some injustice that needs correcting. The injustice must be ‘grave’ enough to warrant the war’s costs and hazards. The implication is that many forms of injustice are better either borne or resisted pacifically, than by resort to force of arms.

‘Just cause’ in the form of a grave injustice is necessary, but not sufficient, to justify going to war. The reason is this. Suppose that you are suffering an unwarranted assault and I intervene against your aggressor. I do so, however, not because I want to protect you, but because I want to get my hands on the oil field under your feet. Therefore, in order for belligerence on behalf of the innocent to be justified, the belligerent must have the ‘right intention’: he must intend the restoration of the innocent to a condition of just peace, first and foremost, and not something else.

Because war is so costly and hazardous, if there are alternative—diplomatic or economic—ways of correcting a grave injustice, those should be preferred. Therefore, to be justified, war must be a ‘last resort’. This does not mean that every imaginable alternative must be sought—that, for example, negotiations with an aggressor who displays serial bad faith must be prolonged under formal breakdown. Rather, it means that all reasonably feasible alternatives should be tried.

The fourth ad bellum criterion is ‘proportionality’. This is a controversial concept that can mean several different things. Some argue that, for a decision to go to war to be ‘proportionate’, we must be sure that the benefits will exceed the costs. The problem with this, however, is that such a calculation is usually impossible. The future is often so unpredictable that we cannot predict the effects of what we do with much certainty. That is all the truer in the matter of war, which, once begun, invariably acquires a momentum of its own that is difficult to control. In practice, often all we can do is to be prudent: judge whether a certain injustice is sufficiently grave as to be intolerable, imagine the worst-case scenario in war and look it honestly in the face, and guesstimate whether we will be able to withstand it, should things go pear-shaped.

An alternative conception of ‘proportionality’ is that no more innocent non-combatants should be inadvertently killed in the course of waging a ‘just war’ than that war is seeking to rescue. The problem with this arithmetic concept is that the aim of a ‘just war’ is seldom merely to save a certain number of lives, but to create new political conditions where the relevant grave injustice will cease and not easily recur to oppress future generations. It is not just about quantity, but also quality. Nor is it just about present individuals, but also future ones. Most people in the Anglophone world think that the war against the massively murderous, European-wide tyranny of Nazi Germany during 1939-45 was morally justified. And yet, its success cost the lives of tens of millions of individual Europeans.

The most sensible concept of proportionality, I think, is one that asks whether war is a necessary or the most apt means to achieve the goal of overcoming a grave injustice. Do belligerent means best fit the securing of the end of a just peace? If so, war is proportionate.

The final ius ad bellum criterion is ‘legitimate authority’. When this was first formulated by Thomas Aquinas back in the 13^th century, it took for granted the political environment in Italy at the time: an anarchy of private enterprise mercenary bodies, city states, and overarching and rival papal and Holy Roman imperial authorities. The point of the criterion, therefore, was to assert, at least, that war should only be waged by bodies with responsibility for the public good, and not by those in pursuit of merely private interests.

In the post-1945 era, the letter of international law permits sovereign states unilaterally to defend themselves against aggression, but otherwise it reserves the authorisation of any other kind of military action to the UNSC. As hinted above, however, the ineradicably political nature of the Security Council, in which the member states pursue their own interests, does entail that sometimes military action that should—morally—be undertaken will be stymied. For example, NATO’s 1999 intervention in Kosovo to stop the ‘ethnic cleansing’ of Albanian Muslims by the Serbs was, strictly speaking, illegal, since it had not been authorised by the UNSC. This was because, had application been made, Russia would have vetoed it because of its historic cultural alliance with Serbia. Nevertheless, according to the eminent Finnish professor of international law, Martii Koskenniemi, “most lawyers … have taken the ambivalent position that [N.A.T.O.’s military intervention in Kosovo] was both formally illegal and morally necessary”.^[ii]

III

Whereas there are five criteria of embarking upon war, there are only two of conducting war. The first of these is ‘discrimination’ or, as it is sometimes referred to, ‘distinction’. This holds that morally justified belligerency must discriminate between combatants and non-combatants, and that it should never intend to harm the latter. The rationale for this is that the proximate aim of warfighting should be to so overwhelm the enemy that he gives up and lays down his arms. This should not be achieved by harming those who do not bear arms in the first place. Intentional attacks on non-combatants, therefore, can have no military justification.

However, the principle of ‘discrimination’ recognises that, in practice, it is often impossible to prosecute a war without risking the lives and limbs of non-combatants. Therefore, what it requires is that a just warrior never intend to harm them, in the sense of not aiming to do so. His aim should always be to hit a military objective. That said, the just warrior may deliberately embark upon a course of action that will risk harm to non-combatants, provided that the objective is sufficiently important, the risk is unavoidable, and every reasonable measure is taken to minimise it. Given those conditions, resultant non-combatant casualties are considered to be ‘collateral damage’—that is, damage that is—literally—beside the point. This manner of thinking about human action is called the theory of ‘double effect’: a single, deliberate action can have two effects or consequences, a good or permissible one that is intended, and a bad or impermissible one that is unintended but, tragically, unavoidable in the circumstances.

The second criterion of the just waging of war is, again, ‘proportionality’. The military means used should be apt to the military objective, causing only such damage—to to combatants, non-combatants, and civilian infrastructure—as is necessary. They should also avoid being counter-productive in terms of the larger, political end of all military means—for example, alienating the hearts and minds of the civilian population and so making the achievement of a just, stable peace more difficult.

These two criteria are the only two elements of the ‘just war’ tradition that have been incorporated into the Laws of War, otherwise (and confusingly) known as ‘International Humanitarian Law’.^[iii]

IV

Whatever injustices Palestinian Arabs have suffered, whatever one thinks about the Israeli settlements on the West Bank, and however one judges the government of Benjamin Netanyahu, the intentionally, sadistically, and—arguably--genocidally indiscriminate slaughter of almost 1,200 civilian men, women, and children on 7 October 2023 had no moral justification in the eyes of the ‘just war’ tradition. Accordingly, Israel was clearly justified—both morally and legally—in resorting to military force to defend its people by preventing Hamas from repeating what it did.

A vigil at the Nova memorial near Kibbutz Reim in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2024. Credit: John Wessels & Agence France-Presse

However, Israel’s subsequent military conduct has provoked ferocious condemnation all over the world, because of the massive number of civilians it has killed, wounded, and deprived of shelter and food. The number is, of course, contested. The Gaza Health Ministry claims almost 62,000 Palestinian deaths to date--although the ministry is Hamas-affiliated and the number includes Hamas fighters, perhaps as many as a third of the total.

A Palestinian child sitting in the wreckage of his city. © UNICEF/Eyad El Baba

My own view has always been, and remains, that the killing of civilians on a massive scale need not be morally wrong. Jonathan Sumption appears to disagree. Writing in the New Statesman last month, he said: “[Hamas’ is a paramilitary movement dispersed among the civilian population like needles in a haystack. It can be destroyed, if at all, only by burning the entire haystack. Yet every sprig of straw in the haystack is a human life”.^[iv] My response is that whether it is justified to destroy the whole haystack depends on the value of the needle and the efficacy of haystack-burning in finding it. That is, it depends not on the quantity of civilian casualties, but on the proportionality of their being killed. During the Second World War the Allies destroyed lots of haystacks in their single-minded pursuit of victory over Nazi Germany. Yet that does not seem to prevent most people in the West—certainly, in its Anglo-Saxon parts—from thinking the war against Hitler morally justified. As I have written previously:

One conservative estimate has it that British and American bombers killed over 350,000 non-combatants in Germany. Air raids over France are supposed to have killed 70,000 French civilians—30,000 during the crucial Normandy campaign alone.

Anyone unaware of the human cost of defeating Hitler should read James Holland’s latest book, The Savage Storm, which chronicles twelve months (1943) of that five-year war in one place (Italy). Old men, women, and children suffered grievously from the Allied invasion, torn apart by bombs and shells, exposed to the wintry elements by the destruction of their homes, and starved of food and water. The British and Americans had no desire to inflict such suffering, they were often horrified by the effects of their warfare, and they sought to provide relief where they could. But their overriding and unrelenting priority was, understandably, military victory over the Nazis.

They could have chosen tactics that would have reduced the risk to civilians. In Italy in 1943—as in Normandy the following year—the Allies relied very heavily on bombing and artillery, so as to preserve the lives of combat soldiers at the front. Had they abandoned that tactic, fewer non-combatants would have died, but victory would have been jeopardised. By the end of the year, instead of the more than three-to-one numerical superiority necessary for success, the invading Allies could often only muster one attacker for every German defender. And the British were beginning to run out of manpower altogether.^[v]

The fact of massive civilian casualties alone does not prove that military action is immoral. We need to know what the intention of that action is—what its goal is—in order to judge whether the chosen means are proportionate or not.

In Gaza, it is certainly a possibility that Israel’s government, motivated by vengeance and racist hatred, intends to exterminate Palestinian civilians. Remarks made by some of the more extreme members of Prime Minister Netanyahu’s cabinet have given weight to that concern. Yet, the views of a couple of ministers do not add up to government policy. And telling against any supposed genocidal intent is the Israeli Defence Force’s long record of scrupulousness in its choice of military targets and the care it has taken in Gaza to warn civilians of attacks, to use weapons of minimal destructive power, and to provide some humanitarian aid. As Niall Ferguson recently wrote in the Times:

John Spencer, professor of urban warfare studies at the Modern War Institute at West Point, New York, has been to Gaza four times, embedded with the IDF. He has interviewed the prime minister, the defence minister, the chief of staff, the Southern Command leadership, and dozens of officers and soldiers on the front lines. In his words: “Nothing I have seen or studied resembles genocide or genocidal intent … [Their orders] focus on destroying Hamas, rescuing hostages, and protecting civilians whenever possible … [Indeed] Israel has taken extraordinary steps to limit civilian harm. It warns before attacks using text messages, phone calls, leaflets and broadcasts. It opens safe corridors and pauses operations so civilians can leave combat areas. It tracks civilian presence down to the building level. I have seen missions delayed or cancelled because children were nearby”.^[vi]

However, if the meaning of ‘genocide’ is loosened to refer, not just to the annihilation of the members of a people, but also to measures taken to prevent them forming and acting as a political whole, then the Israeli settlements in the West Bank may be taken as evidence of genocidal intent. Indeed, Netanyahu’s finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, has been explicit in saying that newly approved settlements in the ‘E1 corridor’ are designed to build a “[Jewish] reality that buries the idea of a Palestinian state”.^[vii] Since I see no prospect of long-term peace other than one that involves the creation of a Palestinian state, and since I have not heard the Netanyahu government describe a feasible alternative, this deliberate obstruction seems to me morally reprehensible. And insofar as it shows a cavalier carelessness regarding the fate of Palestinians in the West Bank, it is gravely reprehensible. Nonetheless, even though international law might classify such a policy as ‘genocidal’, I would not. That is because it blurs an important moral distinction: the West Bank is not Auschwitz.

Nor is the West Bank, Gaza. And according to John Spencer’s testimony, the IDF’s operations in Gaza are focused on destroying Hamas and rescuing hostages, while protecting civilians where possible. So, as far as I can see, the charge of genocide in Gaza does not fit the facts.

However, I have always thought that Israel’s policy is vulnerable to the charge of disproportionality. As I have said before, to be fully justified, military means should be apt to the political end of securing a sufficiently just peace. Military strategy needs to be integrated into a larger, political strategy. And it has not been clear (to me) that Israel has a political strategy to resolve the century-long conflict with the descendants of those Palestinian Arabs who fled, or were displaced from, their homes in the first half of the 20^th century.

In 2012 a documentary film, “The Gatekeepers”, was first broadcast, comprising in-depth interviews with six former heads of Shin Bet, the Israeli internal security service. The very first segment bears the telling title, “No Strategy, Just Tactics”, because one after another the former security chiefs said, in effect, “We’re in the business of stamping on potential fires, preventing terrorist attacks, and we’ve been doing that forever. But the problem is that there is no political strategy, just military tactics”.

Benjamin Netanyahu was Prime Minister of Israel then and he has remained so since. In the past decade, it is not obvious that his government has developed a strategy for peace, beyond the crude one advocated by the militant Zionist leader Ze’ev Jabotinsky in 1923. Jabotinsky candidly admitted that Jewish and Arab claims upon Palestine were irreconcilable. His solution? That a Jewish state should erect an “iron wall”, against which the Arabs would eventually tire of knocking their heads. Then they would compromise and make peace. However, Hamas’s atrocious assault in October 2023 has proven Jabotinsky terribly wrong. For, far from making them tired, a hundred years of fruitless head-banging have made some Palestinians insanely, nihilistically violent. If Israel really wants peace, it will need much more than an iron wall.

I am no expert on Israeli security policy, but the 600 retired Israeli security officials, including former heads of intelligence agencies, who signed an open letter on 3 August, are. In this, they stated that “[it] is our professional judgement that Hamas no longer poses a strategic threat to Israel”. The former Defence Minister Moshe Yaalon said: “At first this war was a just war, a defensive war, but when we achieved all military objectives, this war ceased to be a just war”.^[viii]

So, yes, my view has changed, but only in confirming my suspicion that Israel’s policy in Gaza is disproportionate. Disproportionate, that is, not in the sense that the policy has breached some absolute number of morally acceptable civilian casualties, since I don’t believe such an absolute number exists. Disproportionate, rather, in the sense that civilian casualties are being incurred in pursuit of a policy that is futile and, indeed, counterproductive.

On the one hand, Israel’s military action has severely and justly disabled Hamas, and might disable it further. On the other hand, it has failed to secure the release of the twenty or so hostages thought to be still alive. And unless Hamas decides to surrender—which looks unlikely—those hostages will probably die when the IDF makes its final assault, whether killed inadvertently by their would-be liberators or deliberately by their suicidal captors.

Moreover, even if Hamas in its current form is destroyed, it will revive in due course, populated by fresh recruits whose outrage at the humanitarian crisis in Gaza has deepened their hatred of Israel. And the hundred-year-war will extend more deeply into its second century.

So, while Israel’s military policy has justly succeeded in defending its people against any repetition of the 7 October atrocity in the immediate future, it is now unjustly jeopardising their security in the long term and causing pointless civilian casualties along the way. It has become disproportionate.

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^[i] The following two sections have been lifted almost verbatim from Nigel Biggar, All Things Considered: Making moral sense of the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, Occasional Paper 201 (Sydney: Centre for Independent Studies, June 2024), pp. 2-3: https://nigelbiggar.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/Biggar-2024-CIS-Just-War-June-2024.pdf

^[ii] Martti Koskenniemi, “‘The Lady Doth Protest Too Much: Kosovo and the Turn to Ethics in International Law”, The Modern Law Review, 65/2 (March 2002), p. 162.

^[iii] International Humanitarian Law is not to be confused with International Human Rights Law.

^[iv] Jonathan Sumption, “A question of intent”, New Statesman, 16 July 2025: https://www.newstatesman.com/world/middle-east/2025/07/a-question-of-intent

^[v] Biggar, All Things Considered, pp. 15-16.

^[vi] Niall Ferguson, “A genocide is underway—but it’s not in Gaza”, Times, 2 August 2025: https://www.thetimes.com/comment/columnists/article/a-genocide-is-under-way-but-its-not-in-gaza-pkgl7vh8h

^[vii] Gabrielle Weiniger, “Israeli settlement ‘buries Palestinian statehood dream’”, Times, 15 August 2025: https://www.thetimes.com/world/middle-east/article/settlement-plan-palestine-state-hpddl78x7

^[vii] Paulin Kola, “Hundreds of Israeli ex-officials appeal to Trump to help end Gaza war”, BBC (News), 4 August 2025: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/crkznje8nz8o