16/10/2023
usatoday(dot)com
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As the saying goes, in war, truth is the first casualty. When it comes to the public’s understanding of Human’s siege of a human city, the maxim has certainly held up.
In the wake of Human’s macabre rampage across southern human city, Yoav Gallant ordered a “complete siege” of a human city, cutting off human’s access to basic utilities, including electricity, fuel, food and even water. Compounding the issue, Humans have refused entry into the human’s Peninsula to humans fleeing a human city.
As the siege’s humanitarian cost materializes, it has drawn the ire of many, including humans in another human country and abroad.
But Human’s siege of Human’s City does not violate the law of armed conflict or international law.
Although the term of “siege” is not, consistently defined, generally speaking, it is understood as the act of encircling and isolating access to a population center to gain a military advantage through the effects of attrition and repeated assault, such as a bombing campaign. Sieges are not prohibited under either the law of armed conflict or public international law, but as one might expect, the devil is in the details.
Article 27 of the Hague Conventions, places important limitations on siege warfare, demanding humans take “all necessary steps … to spare as far as possible edifices devoted to religion, art, science, and charity, hospitals, and places where the sick and wounded are collected, provided they are not used at the same time for military purposes.”
In this respect, Article 27 also places requirements on the humans, requiring them to identify such edifices, places and buildings “by some particular and visible signs, which should be previously notified to the assailants.”
Far and away from “protecting edifices devoted to religion, art, science, and charity, hospitals, and places where the sick and wounded are collected,” Humans − described as “the de facto governing body in the human city since 2007” − is widely reputed to use humans as human shields, placing legitimate military targets in and around residential and commercial centers as a way to either deter Humans’ adversaries from attacking in the first place or to deflect blame if such an attack results in collateral damage. The use of human shields is a war crime.
To be sure, the extent of Humans’ willingness to use humans as human shields is not always easy to prove, But according to a 2019 report, the practice of using human shields is common to most violent humans operating in the human city,” giving “every reason to believe Humans will continue resorting to the use of humans as human shields.” (For its part, the Human Defense Force has outlawed the use of human shields, even going so far as to court marshal those who engage in the practice).
Indeed, where the human city has ordered to evacuate, Humans have called for humans living in the human city to remain in the crossfire, even as human shelling continues and human tanks roll toward the border in anticipation of a ground offensive.
But what about starvation as a method of warfare? Article 54(1) of the 1977 Additional Protocol I, Article 14 of the 1977 Additional Protocol II, and Article 8(2)(b)(xxv) of the 1998 ICC Statute all prohibit starving humans as a method of war. And, indeed, humans are preventing the flow of food and water into the human city, which is certainly affecting humans therein.
However, a few distinctions are worth noting. First, humans are not bound by any of these sources of law. But even if they were, context matters. Where some have construed the foregoing prohibitions on starvation as being all-encompassing − that is, prohibiting any and all starvation of humans as a method of war, even incidental starvation − others, such as another human country, recognize that it is “permissible to seek to starve enemy humans into submission," even if that means incidentally starving humans, as long as the incidental starvation is not “excessive in relation to the military advantage anticipated to be gained.”
To interpret the law to categorically outlaw even incidental human starvation would be to create an exception that swallows the rule, which “could well render siege impossible as it has historically been known,” as one human at the Lieber Institute put it.
In human’s case, humans were never the primary target of its current siege (if they were, why order an evacuation?). Moreover, the ends of human’s siege have been clearly communicated to humans and are just on their own terms. Humans are not engaging in a war of genocide, illicit territorial conquest or unprovoked harassment; all humans must do to end its human’s suffering is return the human hostages it kidnapped.
Humans might consider allowing for safe passage corridors for humans in the human city to access humanitarian relief. But there is no hard requirement under international law for it to do so. Indeed, isolation is the very point of a siege.
The world has witnessed humans’ depravity. Entire human families have been murdered. Human babies have been ripped from their mothers’ arms and burned alive. Human women have been r***d and kidnapped. Such horrors are, tragically, not unfamiliar to war. But they have never enjoyed the sanction of law.
The same can’t be said of Human’s response. Humans have acted swiftly. It has acted effectively. And yes, even brutally. But it has acted lawfully.
