The devastation in Gaza is difficult to overstate. Tens of thousands of Palestinians are dead, neighborhoods have been flattened, and the territory’s already fragile food supply has been brought to the edge of collapse.
This war began after Hamas fighters stormed villages, military outposts, and a music festival in southern Israel on October 7, 2023—killing about 1,200 people and taking 251 others hostage. The United Nations later concluded that Hamas had committed war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, framed the response as both urgent and just. “Like every country, Israel has an inherent right to defend itself,” he said. The goals, he added, were clear: dismantle Hamas and free the hostages. In January 2024, he went further, insisting that “Israel’s commitment to international law is unwavering.”
But as the war has stretched on, that claim has come under mounting scrutiny. Human rights groups, some foreign governments, and prominent legal scholars accuse Israel of committing acts that go far beyond self-defense—charges of ethnic cleansing and even genocide. Netanyahu has flatly rejected those accusations, dismissing them as slander.
At the heart of the debate is a principle of international law that is both simple and fraught: proportionality.
The International Committee of the Red Cross defines it as a balance—“the effects of the means and methods of warfare used must not be disproportionate to the military advantage sought.” In practice, the meaning of that balance has fueled decades of disputes among lawyers, diplomats, and generals.
To test Israel’s actions against this principle, Verify spoke with a wide range of international law experts. Their verdict was strikingly consistent.
“I would struggle to see how Israel’s military conduct in Gaza could potentially be characterised as proportionate,” said Janina Dill, a professor at Oxford’s Blavatnik School of Government.
Maria Varaki of King’s College London went further: “It is indisputable that the use of force in Gaza has been disproportionate.”
Yuval Shany, a professor at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, argued that “the military campaign can no longer be seen as proportionate.” And even Asa Kasher, a Tel Aviv University philosopher who helped draft the Israeli military’s code of ethics, conceded that the civilian toll “seems too high to be taken to result from reasonable proportionality considerations.”
The legal framework underpinning these judgments is diffuse but well established. International law does not rest on a single text or central authority; it is built from treaties, conventions, and customary practice. Israel is a party to both the UN Charter and the Geneva Conventions, which directly govern the rules of war.
Under these agreements, proportionality is assessed in two ways.
First, there is the scale of the war itself. A state may invoke self-defense, but its overall response must be proportionate to the threat it faces. If a campaign drags on beyond necessity—or if the adversary’s capacity has been degraded to the point where it no longer poses the same threat—the legal ground for continued military action weakens. Some experts argue that Israel crossed that line months ago, though this point remains hotly contested.
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Second, proportionality applies to each individual military strike. An air raid, for example, must weigh the expected military advantage against the anticipated harm to civilians and civilian infrastructure. That calculation hinges on intent: What harm is foreseen, and is it justified by the gain?
These questions have no easy answers. International law leaves room for interpretation, and states often claim wide latitude in making battlefield judgments. But the devastation in Gaza has sharpened the spotlight on those interpretations.
In the end, proportionality is not just a legal doctrine—it is a test of legitimacy. And as the images from Gaza continue to circulate, Israel’s justification for its campaign grows more difficult to sustain in the eyes of much of the world.
