Israel’s campaign against Hamas is, in international law terms, an exercise of national self-defense. Like all other nations, Israel has an inherent right to use military force based on this legal justification (although there are some scholars who continue to believe that self-defense arises only in response to an armed attack from another state, an interpretation that is increasingly considered impermissibly restrictive). But what exactly does self-defense justify in terms of the scope and duration of military action?

The most common criticism of the IDF campaign is that it is too aggressive, producing too many casualties and too much physical destruction in Gaza. The ever-growing chorus of demands for an immediate and unconditional cease fire is the most obvious manifestation of this criticism. Those who embrace this view fail, however, to explain how it aligns with the inherent right of self-defense, or perhaps embrace some flawed conception of self-defense as some type of tit for tat equation requiring a proportionality of harm between the aggressor and the defender.

These understandings miss the point. Self-defense for a nation is analogous to self-defense for an individual: it legally justifies measures that would otherwise be unlawful when acting in response to an actual or imminent unlawful attack. But there is an important limitation on those measures: they must be reasonably necessary to reduce the threat and restore the status quo ante of safety and security. Indeed, self-defense is derived from the general legal justification of necessity, which means simply that if a measure is necessary it is justified; if it is not then it exceeds justification and remains illegal. This is another way of saying that the response must be proportional to the threat.

This is why tit for tat self-defense is so highly misleading: it is the threat that dictates the permissible scope of self-defense, not the suffering inflicted by the unlawful aggression that triggers the right. It is logical for a state to assess the scope of an imminent or ongoing threat by considering not only the opponent’s capability to inflict harm, but its motivation and intent. To this end, it is important to remember that the express goal of Hamas is to annihilate Israel and kill as many Jews as possible, and that the only reason they didn’t succeed in killing more on Oct 7 and the following days is because Israeli security forces were able to repel the invasion. Translated into military terms, this really leads to a very simple question: what scope of military action is necessary to secure the safety of the Israeli population from the Hamas (and Palestinian Islamic Jihad) threat emanating from Gaza?

That question cannot be answered by simply comparing casualty numbers. Even assuming some validity to the numbers provided by the Hamas controlled health ministry in Gaza (numbers which from inception have conflated civilian and enemy deaths), the mere fact that more civilians have been killed in Gaza than were killed in Israel on October 7th or since does not indicate an excessive or disproportionate response. Instead, the more logical question is focused on whether it is reasonable to assess a necessity to destroy Hamas as a fighting force capable of projecting violence against Israel? And in this regard, it is highly significant that in prior conflict flare ups, Israel attempted more limited military self-defense actions. October 7th proved that these limited responses failed to security Israel from the Hamas threat and render reasonable the conclusion that nothing short of a full-scale campaign to destroy this enemy’s military capability was necessary. Indeed, it is likely that historians will question whether Israel exercised unnecessary restraint up to this point, thereby exposing their population to constant rocket attacks, cross-border assault tunnel incursions and other attacks over the 16 year period in which Hamas has controlled Gaza.

https://www.thecipherbrief.com/ground-truth-the-disconnect-c...