Search Results for: jihad

The Oct. 17 explosion at Gaza’s Al-Ahli Arab Hospital shook the world. With a civilian death toll reportedly in the hundreds, accusations were initially lobbed against Israel, which swiftly contradicted the allegation. The country asserted the explosion was instead caused by a faulty rocket fired from Gaza, later producing geospatial and audio evidence to support [...]

On Wednesday, two people targeted a Berlin, Germany synagogue with molotov cocktails, a type of homemade firebomb, and rioters in Tunisia burned down the historic El Hamma synagogue. The attacks came as tensions continue to boil over in the wake of Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel and Israel’s subsequent siege of Gaza. Berlin police [...]

A blast at the Anglican Church-run Al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City’s southern Al Zaytoun neighborhood Tuesday evening local time killed hundreds of people, according to the Palestinian Red Crescent. Gaza’s health ministry initially placed the death toll at 500 and blamed an Israel Defense Force (IDF) airstrike. However, on Wednesday, the IDF released surveillance [...]

In response to the October 7, 2023 Hamas attacks against Israeli civilians, Israel mounted Operation Swords of Iron. Although international law allows for certain limited uses of insurgent force, including uses directed toward “self-determination,” these residual allowances do not include any rights of indiscriminate violence or of deliberate attacks on noncombatants. “Revenge,” of course, is [...]

“The existence of `system’ in the world is obvious to every observer of nature, no matter whom.” Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man (1959)           Whether conspicuous or obscure, terrorism generally presents itself as a systemic challenge. This means, inter alia, that seemingly singular strategic and legal matters may actually be many-sided and interrelated. Regarding legal issues, though [...]

Israel and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) militant group in the Gaza Strip arrived at ceasefire on Saturday, which put an end to five days of fighting that resulted in approximately 33 Palestinian casualties and two Israeli casualties. The ceasefire went into effect at approximately 10:00 PM local time. As of Sunday morning, the ceasefire [...]

Palestinian activist Khader Adnan, who has been affiliated with the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PJI) group, died Tuesday in an Israeli prison following a hunger strike that lasted 86 days. In response to his death, armed supporters fired rockets from Gaza towards southern Israel. Adnan, who had been frequently imprisoned over the last 20 years, had [...]

In its steadily escalating war on Palestinian terror, Israel has a law-based responsibility to limit harm to Arab populations and a concurrent responsibility not to bring war-related suffering to its own populations. To clarify these intersecting obligations, this essay will focus on pertinent legal issues of insurgency, counterterrorism, and humanitarian international law in the Middle [...]

During the Barack Obama presidency, the Justice Department prepared a 16-page unsigned, undated “White Paper” that outlined the administration’s legal reasoning justifying unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-targeted killings of terrorism suspects if an informed high-level official decided that the target was a high-ranking al-Qaida figure or affiliate who posed an imminent threat of violent attack against [...]

Now facing further rounds of terror attack, Israel must prepare itself along the intersecting dimensions of law and strategy. Law, the first dimension, is universal. It applies to all combatants, everywhere. Strategy, the second dimension, is integral to the creation and maintenance of any single state’s national security policies. From the beginning, a recurrent Palestinian [...]