“Humanitarian” Killing Zones

Commentators have long observed that international humanitarian law (IHL) — which is intended to limit human suffering in armed conflict — is often invoked by belligerents to legitimize, rather than constrain, conduct harmful to civilians (e.g. here, here, and here). Concerns that expedient interpretations of IHL are undermining its protective function have been voiced with renewed urgency in recent years, particularly in the wake of the devastating campaign that Israel has been waging in Gaza since October 2023 (e.g. here, here, and here). While much of the suffering endured by civilians during the hostilities between Israel and Hamas-led armed groups stems from blatant disregard for IHL, there have also been attempts to dress harmful Israeli conduct in legal garb.

In some cases, this has involved interpretations that upset the delicate balance between military necessity and humanity that underpins IHL, tilting the scales in favour of the former. Examples of such interpretive techniques include:

Expanding definitions of ‘military objectives’ and ‘fighters’ to misrepresent civilian objects and civilians as legitimate military targets (see here at p. 46).
Stretching exceptions — such as those permitting internment for ‘imperative reasons of security’, or demolition of property when ‘rendered absolutely necessary by military operations’ — to such a degree that they subvert the rule from which they deviate (see here and here).
Applying the principle of proportionality in a manner that overemphasizes the ‘concrete and direct military advantage anticipated’ from an attack, while downplaying the civilian harm that the attack can be expected to cause, thereby undermining the principle’s protective function (see here at pp. 56-64).

Alongside these (and other) techniques prioritising military necessity, Israel has also appealed to humanitarian considerations — ostensibly with a view to promote human dignity and limit human suffering — in ways that have in fact served to obscure, justify and facilitate the imposition of conditions that threaten the very survival of Palestinians in Gaza. This note aims to provide a brief account of some of these counterintuitive applications of humanitarian language and reasoning showing them to be misplaced, spurious, and dangerous.

Lesser evil

One mode of argumentation that Israel has often resorted to in the past, and which it has also employed extensively during the current hostilities in Gaza, follows the logic of the lesser evil to justify conduct that causes human suffering. The basic structure of this line of reasoning is to insist that a harmful practice is justified because it inflicts less harm on civilians than an alternative course of action.

As critics have observed, such reasoning can and has been abused to distort IHL. For one thing, while IHL does sometimes call for utilitarian cost benefit analysis of a kind, it circumscribes the form this takes. The rule on proportionality in attack, for instance, is confined to assessing, in advance of an attack, whether the expected incidental civilian harm would be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated. In other cases, IHL draws red lines absolutely prohibiting certain practices (e.g., torture). Misuse of the logic of the lesser evil can result in these red lines being transgressed.

In addition, lesser evil arguments are prone to abuse that distorts legal judgement even when utilitarian logic is called for. This is because they lend themselves to positing an artificial binary choice between an evil and a (supposed) lesser evil while obscuring and disregarding still less harmful (or even unharmful) alternatives. The latter risk was painfully evident during the present hostilities in Gaza when Israel employed a lesser evil argument to justify a long succession of relocation directives it has issued which have caused waves upon waves of mass displacement eventually driving almost all of Gaza’s millions of residents from their homes. While described by Israeli officials as a means of “helping civilians leave areas of the most intense fighting”, in practice these directives confronted civilians with a grim choice: the Scylla of remaining in place and risking immediate death or serious injury from Israeli fire, or the Charybdis of relocating indefinitely to unsafe and underserved zones where they would face more drawn-out perils.

Even if it were accepted arguendo, first, that Israel issued the relocation directives to allow it to pursue a legitimate military objective and, second, that this was done with a genuine intent to spare civilians from unintended harm that they might incur while Israel pursued this objective, Israel’s purported humanitarian justifications for the directive do not stand up to scrutiny. As Ellen Nohle and I have argued, such justifications for forcible displacement are of no avail when it is possible to navigate a safer passage between Scylla and Charybdis, that is, when the harm inflicted by displacement is either unnecessary (because the objective, even if lawful, could be achieved by less harmful means), or excessive in relation to any legitimate benefit it might yield. Israel’s displacement of millions of people in Gaza for an indefinite rather than the shortest necessary duration, and without taking the steps necessary to secure their safety and wellbeing, clearly inflicts unnecessary and excessive human suffering. It is consequently in breach of the prohibition on forcible transfer (see Section 3.2 here) and of IHL rules on the conduct of hostilities (Section 3.3 here) and may implicate those responsible in the commission of war crimes (Article 8(2)(a)(vii)/8(2)(b)(viii) ICC Statute) and crimes against humanity (Article 7(1)(d) ICC Statute).

Lesser evil reasoning was applied in even more dubious fashion to suggest that Israel’s wholesale destruction of much of the built-up area of Gaza was undertaken because “the Israeli military has a responsibility to destroy some buildings as they are structurally unsound and unsafe for returning civilians” (quoted here). Israel’s systematic destruction of entire villages and towns in Gaza, including countless homes, healthcare facilities, places of education and worship, cultural centres, bakeries and factories, and other crucial civilian infrastructure, has had such devastating humanitarian consequences as to be among the factors cited by expert commentators in support of the conclusion that Israel is perpetrating genocide in Gaza. The argument that this extensive and wanton destruction with its tragic implications was perpetrated for the benefit of its victims is both absurd and obscene. In fact, by ensuring that millions of Gazans whom Israel has driven from their homes will have no place to return to, this destruction has effectively foreclosed any plausible contention that the displacement was a temporary, necessary and proportionate measure that can be defended as a lesser evil.

Spin

Israeli authorities have also made Orwellian use of the label “humanitarian” to put a positive gloss on unlawful mass-displacement and mass-internment. Thus, the areas to which Palestinians in Gaza were instructed to relocate, purportedly for their own safety, have been referred to as “humanitarian zones” — even though they have not been spared attack and are so underprovided that the many people crammed within their tight confines face life threatening conditions of deprivation.

More recently Israel’s Defence Minister Israel Katz said that he had instructed the military to prepare for the construction of a “humanitarian city” in the south of the enclave. According to the plan outlined by Katz and backed by Prime Minister Netanyahu and his Cabinet, the entire population of Gaza would eventually be relocated to this facility and, once inside, would not be permitted to leave save for the purpose of “voluntary emigration”. Such euphemistic language notwithstanding, critics, including former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, have insisted that the envisioned facility would be a concentration camp, and that the planned relocation, confinement and exile of Gaza’s population would entail IHL violations, war crimes and crimes against humanity (e.g. here, here, here, here, and here).

The flip side of establishing so-called “humanitarian zones”, is the assessment that “those outside these zones will later be identified as Hamas terrorists, providing legal justification for their elimination” (see here). The remainder of the Gaza Strip has thus been designated a killing zone.

In addition to the threat of falling victim to Israeli fire, Palestinians have been coerced to move by the threat of starvation. After a few months in which it imposed a siege on Gaza, completely cutting of supplies of food and other resources indispensable to the survival of Gaza’s civilian population, since June 2025 Israel has been implementing a purported aid delivery scheme which distributes food through just four intermittently operating hubs, all located in southern and central Gaza (as opposed to hundreds of distribution points that aid agencies previously operated). While ostensibly performing a humanitarian function, this scheme creates coercive conditions for Palestinians in other parts of the enclave to relocate to the proximity of these hubs.

Moreover, the scheme, as well as the private actor charged with implementing it — inappropriately named the “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation” — have proven woefully inapt, utterly failing to meet the population’s needs as required under international law (see here, here and here). Indeed, despite their professed humanitarian function, the scheme’s distribution sites — where Israeli troops and private security personnel have used unlawful force, killing and injuring thousands of people desperately clamouring for food — have been described as “killing fields”.

Triad of evils

The upshot is that, while spuriously offering humanitarian aid and protection, Israel is in fact creating conditions that will compel Gazans to choose between a triad of evils:

A terrifying and likely short existence in killing zones where everyone is at a high risk of being targeted;
Indefinite internment in “humanitarian” zones where they will endure deprivations so severe that starvation is a likely prospect; or
Permanent exile from their homeland.

Many commentators have recognized the iniquity of these conditions, noting that by forcing Palestinians to leave Gaza Israel is guilty of ethnic cleansing, and that by turning Gaza into a wasteland where its people can no longer exist it is committing genocide. At the same time, other influential actors, including third States, have not effectively challenged Israel’s twisted application of humanitarian language and reasoning even as it has made a travesty of humanitarian law and of its underlying values. This omission on the part of third States, not to mention their complicity through active support for Israel’s actions, constitutes an abdication of their duty to ensure respect for IHL and of their responsibilities with respect to violations of peremptory norms of international law.

Pursuing extra-legal interests and agendas, officials from these States seem blind or oblivious to Israel’s corruption of humanitarian law and to its consequences, calling to mind the metaphor of “The Zone of Interest”. Alongside Gaza’s deathly “humanitarian” zones, and killing zones, this zone forms another triad of evils driving the ongoing tragedy we are witnessing in Gaza.