Abstract:
International humanitarian law exists in the form it does because the states that wrote it in 1949 had just witnessed what happens when armies are given no legal constraint on who they can kill and what they can destroy. The four Geneva Conventions and their Additional Protocols established a specific architecture of protection: journalists are civilians unless they directly participate in hostilities. Hospitals are protected facilities unless used for military purposes, with the burden of proof on the attacking party. Aid workers are protected persons. Children are protected persons. Places of worship are protected structures. UN facilities carry specific legal protection under the Convention on Privileges and Immunities. Each of these protections has been violated in Gaza, not once, not occasionally, but systematically and at scale confirmed by the UN, international human rights organizations, peer-reviewed studies, and the casualty records of the organizations whose members were killed. The Committee to Protect Journalists confirmed 270 journalists killed in Gaza since October 7, 2023, the highest single-conflict journalist death toll in the organization`s history of record-keeping. Wikipedia`s Gaza War article confirmed 120 academics killed and 560 humanitarian aid workers killed, including 391 UNRWA staff. Al Jazeera`s annual count confirmed that across one year, 114 hospitals and clinics were rendered non-functional, 34 hospitals and 80 health centers put out of service, 162 health institutions struck, and 131 ambulances hit and damaged. A Harvard University study confirmed that in the first six weeks of the war alone, nearly 600 highly destructive 2,000-pound bombs were dropped within lethal and damage ranges of hospitals. The UN Secretary-General`s annual report on children and armed conflict confirmed that the highest number of grave violations against children anywhere in the world in 2024 was in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territory, at 8,554 verified violations, 7,188 attributed to Israeli armed and security forces. The United States confirmed each of these facts. It vetoed every Security Council resolution that would have created accountability for them.
Main Article:
International humanitarian law does not protect the powerful from the consequences of war. It protects the powerless from the methods of the powerful. Its specific protections, each written into the Geneva Conventions and their Additional Protocols after specific historical experiences of what armies do without constraint, are not aspirational principles. They are legal obligations that states party to those conventions have undertaken as binding requirements. Every state engaged in the conflict described in this chapter is a signatory. The confirmed record of what those signatories have done in Gaza is the subject of this chapter.
Journalists are civilians under international humanitarian law unless they directly participate in hostilities. Participating in hostilities means conducting hostile acts: firing weapons, directing attacks, carrying out military orders. Documenting what other people do while firing weapons is not participating in hostilities. It is journalism, and it is protected by the same civilian protections that protect every other non-combatant. The Committee to Protect Journalists confirmed 270 journalists killed in Gaza since October 7, 2023, the highest single-conflict journalist death toll in the organization`s history of record-keeping across every conflict in every country since the organization began tracking such deaths. The specific circumstances of individual journalist killings confirm, across numerous documented cases, that journalists were killed while wearing press insignia, in vehicles marked press, after notifying the Israeli military of their location through the coordination mechanisms that exist specifically to provide such notification. The World Press Freedom Index, the International Federation of Journalists, and Reporters Without Borders have each confirmed that the targeted killing of journalists in Gaza has occurred at a rate and with a systematic pattern inconsistent with incidental civilian casualties.(1)
Academics constitute a different professional category whose protection derives from the same civilian status. Wikipedia`s Gaza War article confirmed 120 academics killed since October 7, 2023. An academic in Gaza is a professor at the Islamic University of Gaza, the Al-Azhar University of Gaza, or one of the territory`s other higher education institutions. These individuals teach subjects including engineering, medicine, law, social sciences, and the humanities. The killing of 120 academics in a territory of 365 square kilometers, across a population of 2.2 million, is the destruction of an entire generation of professional instruction. The Islamic University of Gaza, the largest university in Gaza, was destroyed in Israeli strikes. The argument that its academic staff were military targets requires evidence that each of the 120 individuals killed was directly participating in hostilities. No such evidence has been presented for any of the 120.(2)
Humanitarian aid workers hold protected status under both the Geneva Conventions and the specific international conventions governing the protection of humanitarian personnel. Five hundred and sixty humanitarian aid workers were confirmed killed in Gaza since October 7, 2023, including 391 employees of UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency. The killing of 391 UN employees is the highest confirmed death toll for UN personnel in any conflict in the organization`s history. UNRWA`s mandate, confirmed by repeated General Assembly resolutions, is the provision of humanitarian assistance to Palestinian refugees. Its employees deliver food, water, medicine, and education to the population Gaza`s siege has deprived of all four. Under the Convention on the Privileges and Immunities of the United Nations, UN facilities and personnel carry specific legal protections beyond those of ordinary civilian aid workers. Israel struck UN facilities confirmed in Deir al-Balah on March 18, 2026, killing one international staff member and wounding five, confirmed by the Palestinian letter to the Security Council. Israel has also sought to have UNRWA defunded and banned, using accusations of Hamas infiltration that independent investigations have not confirmed at the scale the accusations imply.(3)
Hospitals are among the most specifically protected structures in international humanitarian law. The Fourth Geneva Convention`s Article 19 states that the protection to which civilian hospitals are entitled shall not cease unless they are used to commit, outside their humanitarian function, acts harmful to the enemy. The standard commentary on this article confirms that the burden of proof for showing such use lies with the attacking party, and that specific warnings must be given before any protection is lost. A study published by the FXB Center for Health and Human Rights at Harvard University confirmed that in the first six weeks of the war alone, between October 7 and November 17, 2023, the Israeli military air-dropped nearly 600 highly destructive 2,000-pound bombs within lethal and damage ranges of hospitals across the Gaza Strip. One-third of the bombs identified were within dangerous proximity of hospitals. The authors concluded that the systematic pattern of dropping these bombs close enough to hospitals to knowingly cause significant damage, injury, and death supports the assessment that Israel disregarded the protection of hospitals mandated by international humanitarian law. By the first anniversary of the war, Al Jazeera confirmed that 114 hospitals and clinics had been rendered non-functional, 34 hospitals and 80 health centers put out of service, 162 health institutions struck, and 131 ambulances hit and damaged.(4)
Children are protected persons under international humanitarian law and under the Convention on the Rights of the Child, to which Israel is a party. The UN Secretary-General`s annual report on children and armed conflict, submitted to the Security Council in 2025, confirmed that the highest number of grave violations against children anywhere in the world in 2024 was in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territory, at 8,554 verified violations, 7,188 of which were attributed to Israeli armed and security forces. The violations include killing and maiming, recruitment and use of child soldiers, attacks on schools and hospitals, abduction, denial of humanitarian access, and sexual violence. Gaza`s confirmed killed children number 20,179 as of May 7, 2026. UNICEF`s executive director confirmed that Israeli attacks on March 18, 2026 caused the largest single-day child death toll in the past year. Children in December 2025 who were killed by Israeli drone strikes were described by the Israeli military coordination authority COGAT as conducting suspicious activities and posing an immediate threat to soldiers. An eight-year-old and a ten-year-old.(5)
The ICJ proceedings have produced the most formally authoritative legal assessments of what is occurring. The International Court of Justice, in its January 2024 order, found that there is a plausible risk of genocide in Gaza and ordered provisional measures including the prevention of genocidal acts. The court found it was plausible that the rights of Palestinians in Gaza to be protected from genocide were at risk. The Genocide Convention`s definition of genocide includes acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group, including killing members of the group, causing serious bodily or mental harm, and deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part. The confirmed record of 72,628 killed, 377,000 unaccounted for, 92 percent of housing destroyed, the aid blockade preventing reconstruction, the detention and systematic abuse of professional classes, and the blocking of the heavy machinery needed to recover those still under rubble constitutes the conditions of life whose confirmation the Court found sufficient to order provisional measures.(6)
The United States vetoed every Security Council resolution that would have created accountability for any of the confirmed violations described in this chapter. The United States has been Israel`s primary weapons supplier throughout the conflict, providing thousands of 2,000-pound bombs, Hellfire missiles, and other munitions. A Harvard University study confirmed that US-made bombs have been identified in specific high-profile strikes including the June 2024 attack on a UN school. The state that vetoed accountability for the violations was also the primary supplier of the weapons that produced them. This is not a legal observation. It is a factual one, confirmed by the US government`s own arms transfer records and Security Council voting record.
The Geneva Conventions were written in 1949 to prevent specifically what has occurred in Gaza. The drafters of those conventions understood that without specific legal prohibitions, armies would kill journalists, bomb hospitals, detain civilians without process, target the professional classes of populations they sought to suppress, and impose conditions of life calculated to destroy the ability of populations to survive and resist. The conventions prohibited each of these specifically. The prohibition was confirmed as applicable by every legal authority with jurisdiction to make the assessment. It was not enforced. The 270 journalists, the 120 academics, the 560 aid workers, the 20,179 children are the confirmed record of what specific legal prohibitions produce when the power to enforce them is held by the party most invested in their non-enforcement.
References:
(1) Committee to Protect Journalists, Gaza database, updated May 2026, confirming 270 journalist deaths; World Press Freedom Index, RSF, 2024-2026; International Federation of Journalists, Gaza documentation.
(2) Wikipedia, "Gaza War," updated May 2026, confirming 120 academics and 560 humanitarian workers; Al Jazeera, "One Year of Israel`s War on Gaza: By the Numbers," October 8, 2024.
(3) Al Jazeera, op. cit., confirming 391 UNRWA staff killed; Letter from the State of Palestine to the UN Security Council, March 18, 2026, confirming UN Deir al-Balah strike; Convention on the Privileges and Immunities of the United Nations, 1946.
(4) FXB Center for Health and Human Rights at Harvard University, "New Study Shows Israel Air-Dropped 2000lb Bombs Within Lethal and Damage Ranges of Hospitals in Gaza," October 10, 2024; Al Jazeera, October 8, 2024, op. cit., confirming hospital statistics.
(5) UN Secretary-General Annual Report on Children and Armed Conflict, 2025, confirmed in Fikr Institute`s previous analysis; Wikipedia, "Gaza War," op. cit., confirming 20,179 children killed; Genocide Watch, "Special Report: Ceasefire Violations," May 2026, confirming Abu Assi brothers.
(6) ICJ, "Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in the Gaza Strip (South Africa v. Israel)," Order on Provisional Measures, January 26, 2024; Genocide Convention, Article 2.