On Saturday the Israeli police and military staged a raid into the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza and succeeded in rescuing 4 Israeli hostages Noa Argamani, Almog Meir Jan, Andrei Kozlov and Shlomi Ziv, who had been held captive by Hamas since being abducted from the Nova music festival on 7 October last yr.
There have been contrasting reactions to this raid.
In Israel was public rejoicing, and their rescue was also welcomed by US President Joe Biden, French President Emmanuel Macron, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and the Russian ambassador to Israel Anatoly Viktorov.
However, Josep Borell, the foreign policy chief of the European Union, wrote on X ‘reports from Gaza of one other massacre of civilians are appalling. We condemn this within the strongest terms,’ and the deputy Foreign Minister of Norway, Andreas Motzfeldt Kravik, wrote on X that he was ‘appalled by reports of one other massacre of civilians in Gaza.’ The Turkish ministry of foreign affairs released a press release declaring that the country deplored the Israeli attack, which it called ‘barbaric’ and one other in a protracted list of ‘crimes’ committed by Israel in Gaza, and the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation condemned what it called ‘the horrific massacre carried out by the Israeli occupation army, which resulted within the murder and injury of tons of of Palestinians, most of them women and kids.’
If we ask the rationale for these contrasting reactions, the reply is that the main target of the responses has been different. Those who’ve welcomed the raid have done so since it resulted in the discharge of the 4 Israeli hostages. Those who’ve condemned it have done so due to the resulting Palestinian casualties, which Israel has suggested were under 100 and the Hamas run Gaza Health Ministry says were 274.
In the sunshine of those differing reactions the query I need to explore in this text is what we’re to make of the Nuseirat raid by way of traditional Christian just war theory.
Christians just war theory considers war under two headings ius ad bellum (the fitting to go to war) and ius in bello (the fitting conduct of war)
Under the fitting to go to war it has generally been held that five criteria need to be satisfied for a call to have interaction in military motion to be morally justified in Christian terms.
- The first is ‘proper authority’. This implies that war have to be declared and waged by the properly constituted political authorities in a specific state as a part of their exercise of the God given ‘power of the sword’ (Romans 13:4).
- The second is ‘right intention.’ The use of deadly force have to be intended, like all actions by governments, to advance the great or prevent or correct evil.
- The third (which follows on from the second) is ‘just cause.’ This means those against whom war is waged must should be attacked on account of some improper that they’ve done. This criterion follows from the reality that the usage of the sword by political authorities is barely justified as a response to wrongdoing. For military motion to be justified there have to be an identifiable improper that needs either to be punished or to be rectified.
- The fourth is that war is ‘the one method to right the improper.’ As Martin Luther argued, this criterion implies that because warfare inevitably involves death and other types of human suffering, governments should attempt to right wrongs by means apart from warfare if in any respect possible, just nearly as good doctors resort to surgery only when it’s the only method to heal the patient.
- The fifth and final criterion is that there must be a ‘reasonable hope of success.’ Since the purpose of engaging in warfare is to attempt to correct a improper and produce a few just peace, there isn’t any point within the exercise if there isn’t any hope that this end may be obtained. The death and suffering involved could be unjustified because they’d be pointless.
Under ‘right conduct in war’ two criteria have been identified for actions undertaken in the middle of a war to be legitimate in Christan terms.
- The first is ‘discrimination, or non-combatant immunity.’ This implies that those engaged in war should never intentionally kill civilians. The point of this criterion is that only enemy combatants must be attacked, which in turn implies that civilians should never be killed intentionally and that every thing possible must be done to forestall them from being killed unintentionally. It must also be noted that under this criterion enemy soldiers who’ve surrendered, or who now not pose a military threat because, for instance, they’re wounded, have the identical status as civilians.
- The second is ‘proportion.’ This criterion follows on from the previous one because while it’s all the time improper to deliberately goal civilians it might sometimes be the case that it’s unimaginable to act against enemy combatants without causing civilian casualties. The criterion of proportionality says that so as to avoid unnecessary civilian casualties the quantity of force used must be only that which is crucial to undertake a legitimate military operation.
If we scrutinise what we all know in regards to the Israeli raid on the Nuseirat refugee camp against these criteria what do, we discover?
First, we discover that it was an act carried out with proper authority. It was an act by the Israeli military duly authorised by the Israeli government.
Secondly, it was an act carried with right intention and in a just cause. The right intention was to revive hostages to their family members and the just cause was that there have been 4 hostages within the Nuseirat refugee camp who needed to be thus restored.
Thirdly, there doesn’t appear to have been any alternative way of liberating these particular hostages except by going into the refugee camp and using force against those that were holding them. It could be argued that the hostages must have been left in captivity pending the final result of successful negotiations for the discharge of hostages between the Israeli government and Hamas, but (a) there was no guarantee that such negotiations would have a successful final result and more importantly (b) given the deaths of other hostages there was no guarantee that those in Nuseirat would remain alive long enough to be released through negotiation.
Fourthly, the Israeli military seems to have judged that the operation to release the hostages had an excellent likelihood of success and the operation’s final result vindicated this judgement. The hostages were brought home.
This brings us to the 2 ‘right motion in war’ criteria of non-combat immunity and proportion. In interested by these criteria we now have to ask whether there’s evidence that the Israeli army deliberately targeted non-combatants (because the language of the ‘massacre’ of civilians would suggest).
The evidence that we now have to date indicates that the rescue of Argamani took place without much fighting, but that a big gun battle erupted throughout the rescue of Meir Jan, Kozlov and Ziv (who were held in a separate location) in the middle of which Amon Zmora, the top of the second Israeli rescue team, was critically wounded. Following that, the Israeli evacuation of Meir Jan, Kozlov, Ziv and Zmora was conducted within the face of an enormous amount of gunfire and RPG fire from Palestinian forces, which in turn led Israeli ground and air forces to perform major military strikes to supply the evacuation with cover.
As has already been noted, the precise variety of Palestinian casualties is disputed, and we would not have a breakdown of civilian versus combatant casualties on the Palestinian side. Furthermore, while it does seem reasonable to think that lots of the Palestinian civilian casualties were a results of Israeli fire, it can also have been the case that a few of them can have been the result of fireside from the Palestinian forces, and nobody has yet produced any evidence to suggest Palestinian civilians were deliberately targeted by the Israeli forces. The most we will say with any certainty was that there was heavy fighting in a densely populated urban area and that as all the time happens in such circumstances there have been civilian casualties consequently.
It appears that the one way such casualties might have been prevented would have been if those holding the hostages had given them up with no fight and if the Palestinian side had then allowed them to be peacefully evacuated. Once fighting broke out, those on the Israeli side had to answer the hearth from the Palestinian forces so as to allow the evacuation to proceed and to get the released hostages home safely. It might have been the case that Israeli covering fire was disproportionate within the sense that it was greater than was required to cover the evacuation, but once more not one of the critics of the Israeli motion has yet provided evidence to point out that this was the case.
In summary, when assessed in the sunshine of Christian just war criteria, we will say the Israeli motion to recue 4 hostages from the Nuseirat refugee camp was an operation carried out with right authority, with right intention and in a just cause. It may be plausibly argued that it was the one method to rescue the hostages, and that the Israeli side rightly believed that the operation had an inexpensive hope of success.
We may say that no evidence has yet been produced to point out that the Israeli side deliberately violated the principle of non-combatant immunity, or that they used disproportionate force to attain their objectives.
Civilian casualties are all the time to be deeply regretted, but a just view of what happened within the Nuseirat refugee camp has to conclude that the blame for these casualties lies with those on the Palestinian side who seized the 4 hostages from the Nova festival in the primary place and who subsequently refused to release them except on terms that might have left Hamas and other Palestinian groups free to attack Israel again.
Blaming the Israelis is like blaming the Allied forces fairly than the Germans for the 35,000 civilian casualties within the Normandy landings in 1944. There would have been zero civilian casualties if the Germans had not began the war in the primary place. Similarly, there would have been zero civilian casualties in Nuseirat had Hamas not attacked Israel on 7 October. It really is Hamas’ fault.
Martin Davie is a lay Anglican theologian and Associate Tutor in Doctrine at Wycliffe Hall, Oxford.
