But perhaps even more fundamental is the question of whether Israel’s invasion is legal under international law.
Israel says it has the right to defend itself, citing rocket attacks by Hezbollah from Lebanese territory over the past year. Some critics disagree.
“Legality is very much in the eye of the beholder,” said Hugh Lovatt, an expert on international law and armed conflict at the European Council on Foreign Relations. “Does Israel’s right to self-defense outweigh Lebanon’s right to sovereignty? We can go around this circle.”
Moreover, some experts say, self-defense has legal limits, especially if Israel’s use of force in Lebanon is disproportionate to the threat it faces or if it fails to prioritize the protection of civilians.
“You have the right to defend yourself, but you have to do this self-defense in a certain way,” said Judge Kai Ambos, a law professor at the University of Göttingen in Germany, who serves on the special court in The Hague. which prosecuted war crimes committed in Kosovo during the 1990s. “It’s not limitless.” Determining the legality of Israel’s invasion can be murky, experts say, allowing for multiple interpretations that, in many cases, must be resolved by courts or the UN Security Council. But it is rare for the courts or the Security Council to deal with these types of questions, and when they do, the process is unlikely to produce a quick conclusion – or anything at all. Here are some legal questions about the Israeli invasion.
What is international law?
Article 2(4) of the Charter of the United Nations “prohibits the threat or use of force and calls on all members to respect the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of other countries.” But Article 51 of the charter also explains that member states have the right to defend themselves against armed attack.
There are other complications. Lebanon is a sovereign country, but Israel says it is fighting Hezbollah, a militant group and influential player in the Lebanese government. (Israel and the United States consider it a terrorist organization.)
Hezbollah was founded in the 1980s, with the help of Iran, to fight the Israeli occupation of Lebanon at the time. Israel and Hezbollah have been in violent conflict ever since, including a bloody war in 2006 that also saw Israel invade Lebanon.
Most recently, after Hamas led the October 7 terrorist attack on Israel last year, Hezbollah began firing rockets and missiles into Israel in solidarity with Hamas, its ally. Israel returned fire, and the two sides engaged in nearly a year of tit-for-tat exchanges. Civilians and fighters in Israel and Lebanon were killed, and between October 7 and the Israeli invasion, more than 150,000 people were displaced on both sides of the border.
Some experts say the invasion was legal because Lebanon allowed Hezbollah to use its territory to attack Israel.
In light of Hezbollah’s rocket and missile attacks, “Israel has the legal right to take self-defense measures against Hezbollah, and probably also against the State of Lebanon,” Amichai Cohen and Yuval Shany, two Israeli law professors, wrote in a published essay. It is for the Lieber Institute for Law and War at the United States Military Academy.
In an email to The New York Times, Shany said the United States and its allies are using the same reasoning for “operations in Syria against ISIS and in several other countries that have al-Qaida.”
“As we noted in our piece,” he added, “the case for self-defense in Lebanon is even stronger.”
The UN Charter says the right to self-defense is only valid “until the Security Council takes the necessary measures to maintain international peace and security.” The council has been trying – and largely failing – to secure a ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah since 2006, a time before Israel launched its ground invasion of Lebanon.
A Security Council resolution that year prohibited foreign troops from entering Lebanon without the government’s consent. Some UN officials have described today’s ground invasion as a “violation of Lebanon’s sovereignty and territorial integrity,” and a panel of UN experts said it was “Israel’s latest violation of international law.”
But the same 2006 resolution also ordered Hezbollah to leave a buffer zone in southern Lebanon where the United Nations has deployed peacekeepers to prevent further conflict with Israel. Hezbollah is not going away, and UN peacekeepers have been unable to stop frequent rocket attacks on Israel over the past year.
(A UN peacekeeping mission working on the Lebanese border has been fired upon by Israel twice in the past week, UN officials said.)
Protection of Humanitarian Law
Separate from the question of the legality of Israel’s invasion, every country has a legal obligation to protect civilians during war.
Although Hezbollah places military targets inside civilian buildings, for example, experts say Israel must consider the safety of noncombatants inside when conducting airstrikes. (International law does not distinguish between ground invasions and airstrikes — the measure is the “use of force,” according to Oona A. Hathaway, a professor of international law at Yale University.)
The United Nations says more than 1,500 people have been killed in Lebanon by the Israeli military in the past two weeks, including hundreds killed in a single day in September, during one of the most intense airstrikes of the recent war.
“While it is difficult to make a clear legal assessment of individual attacks from afar,” said Janina Dill, co-director of the Oxford Institute for Ethics, Law and Armed Conflict, in an email, “the use of heavy explosives in densely populated areas of Lebanon and attacks on buildings the house where Hezbollah militants are suspected of hiding, which caused hundreds of casualties, many of them civilian women and children, raising serious concerns about compliance with the rules.
Nearly 1 million people have been forced to flee their homes in Lebanon, a humanitarian crisis that many fear will rival the one in Gaza.
Humanitarian laws of war, including the Geneva Conventions, require military forces to warn civilians to flee before attacking. Israel has issued an evacuation alert for large parts of southern Lebanon, although in some cases it has given people just two hours to leave their homes before the attack.
Israel must also consider whether displaced people can be safely relocated. For example, the United Nations says more than 250,000 people have fled Lebanon to Syria, which is still ravaged by a civil war that began in 2011.
Do the Law
It is difficult, if not impossible, to enforce the international law of war when states disagree on how to, or even act against, violations.
The International Court of Justice allows lawsuits to be filed against countries accused of violating certain agreements, such as the genocide allegations South Africa has made regarding Israel’s military operations in Gaza.
If the case were to be referred to the international court on military operations in Lebanon, Ambos said, Israel could refuse to abide by the outcome. This would likely refer the legal dispute to the Security Council for action.
The UN General Assembly could also be asked to seek a resolution, Hathaway said. But it has no authority to take action against Israel except to call on member states to do so.
“The question is, who will enforce this?” Ambos said.
This does not mean that international law has no value. The law, he said, imposes a moral standard to protect civilians that no state will admit to having violated. “Are we better off or worse off with these mechanisms, even if they are not implemented?” Ambos said. “Without this law, we would be worse off. The law is there, and the state should at least justify its actions.”
This article first appeared in The New York Times.
