Targeting
Killing General Kirillov: Questions and Answers
On December 17, Lieutenant General Igor Kirillov, the head of Russia’s Radiation, Chemical, and Biological Defense Forces, and his assistant were killed in a bomb explosion outside his Moscow apartment building. The bomb was concealed in an electric scooter and...
Rules of Engagement in Large-Scale Combat Operations: Force Enabler or Much Ado About Nothing?
Rules of Engagement (ROE) have traditionally played a major role in the execution of military operations, particularly when a given situation has not reached the threshold of armed conflict. In more recent years, however, some military operations have used ROE to...
NATO Interoperability When Targeting Indispensable Objects
A recent Lieber Paper strikes an optimistic note concerning legal interoperability, arguing that the dissimilarities stemming from uneven treaty membership between NATO allies are less significant than they may seem. However, one contentious subject has the potential...
Understanding the Distinction Between Property Destruction Governed by Hague Article 23(g) and the Rules Governing Attacks
This analysis follows my prior post explaining the obligations imposed by Article 23(g) of the Hague Regulations of 1907, annexed to Hague Convention IV. For the reasons stated below, the attack rules contained in Additional Protocol I (AP I) control destruction of...
Israel – Hamas 2024 Symposium – Why Yahya Sinwar Was Not Hors de Combat
On or about October 17, 2024, members of the Israel Defense Force (IDF) killed Yahya Sinwar, the political leader of Hamas and a suspected mastermind behind the October 7, 2023 attack that viciously murdered 1,200 Israeli men, women, and children. Among those...
Hybrid Threats and Grey Zone Conflict Symposium – Challenges in the Twilight of International Law
Editors note: The following post highlights a chapter that appears in Mitt Regan and Aurel Sari’s recently published book Hybrid Threats and Grey Zone Conflict: The Challenge to Liberal Democracies. For a general introduction to the series, see Prof Mitt Regan and...
Electronic Warfare and the Law of Armed Conflict
Earlier this year, we had the pleasure of participating in the “Future of Warfare and the Law Symposium” at U.S. Army Futures Command in Austin, Texas. The conference, which was co-sponsored by Army Futures Command, the Strauss Center for International Security and...
Attacking a Pipeline: Legal Issues for Consideration
Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2 are pipelines constructed by a Russian State-controlled company called Gazprom to transport 110 billion cubic metres of natural gas per year from the Russian Federation under the Baltic Sea to Germany. Gazprom has a 51 percent...
“Well, it Depends”: The Explosive Pagers Attack Revisited
On 17 September, 2024, thousands of pagers distributed by Hezbollah to its operatives in Lebanon and Syria exploded. On the following day, hundreds of walkie talkies used by Hezbollah operatives also exploded. According to the Lebanese Ministry of Health, more than 30...
State Practice in Assassination: What is Old is New Again
In July 2024, CNN reported that American and German intelligence agencies had thwarted a Russian plan to kill Armin Papperger, the chief executive of Rheinmetall, a company known as “the largest and most successful German manufacturer of the vital 155mm artillery...
Attacking Iran: Retaliation or Self-Defense?
On October 1, Iran launched a major two-wave attack consisting of over 180 missiles against Israel. The primary targets were the headquarters of Mossad and three Israeli Air Force bases. However, Israel’s multi-layered air defense systems, supported by U.S. warships,...
Killing Nasrallah and the Law of Armed Conflict
Last Friday, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) conducted air strikes against a Hezbollah command and control bunker in Beirut’s Dahiyeh suburbs, which was located under an apartment complex. The attack, which followed IDF warnings for civilians to evacuate the area,...
A Policy Approach for Addressing the “Cyber Attacks” and “Data as an Object” Debates
Among the issues examined at this week’s International Society of Military Law and the Law of War’s annual Silent Leges Inter Arma? (In Times of War, the Law Falls Silent?) Conference in Bruges, Belgium, is the protection of civilians against digital threats during...
Exploding Pagers and the Law
Reports emerged on 17 September 2024 that, from about 15:45 that day local time, a large number of pagers used by Hezbollah personnel in Lebanon exploded spontaneously and virtually simultaneously. At the time of writing, nine persons are reported to have died and...
Lawfully Using Autonomous Weapon Technologies
Editor's note: This post is derived from the author’s recently published book Lawfully Using Autonomous Weapon Technologies, published with Springer Press. We, members of the human race in 2024, already live in a world saturated with artificial intelligence (AI). Like...
Targeting in an Urban Environment: Why Weaponeering and Tactics Matter
Israel’s ongoing urban operations in Gaza have drawn extensive international scrutiny. Critics have focused on the number of reported civilian casualties, with many attributing Israel’s use of large, high-explosive free-fall bombs in an urban environment as the cause...
International Law and Intelligence Gathering: Mind the Gaps
Intelligence gathering is a fundamental element of both statecraft and the conduct of hostilities. Its integral role in armed conflict is evident in the Israel intelligence service, the Shin Bet, having provided “surgical intelligence” for the July 2024 targeting of...
Targeting in the Black Box: The Need to Reprioritize AI Explainability
States around the world are racing to leverage the rapid evolution of artificial intelligence (AI) to their own military advantage. In the coming decades, AI-based systems are expected to revolutionize logistics, significantly alter targeting processes, and power...
Israel-Hamas 2024 Symposium – Israel’s Jus ad Bellum and LOAC Obligations and the Evolving Nature of the Conflict
According to the New York Times, some senior American officials have concluded Israel has achieved all it can militarily in the Gaza Strip. It reports that “a growing number of national security officials” believe that the Israel Defense Force (IDF) will never be able...
Targeting Hamas’s Ismail Haniyeh and Hezbollah’s Fuad Shukr
On Wednesday morning, Israel killed the Chief of Hamas’s Political Bureau, Ismail Haniyeh, while he was in Tehran to attend the inauguration of Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian. To do so, it reportedly used a bomb that had been smuggled two months earlier into the...
Applying the Unwilling or Unable Test: Israel Strikes Houthi Targets in Yemen
On July 18, 2024, Houthi rebels conducted a drone strike in Tel Aviv, killing one person and wounding at least ten others. The attack was carried out by an Iranian Samad-3 drone that had been modified to conduct the long-range strike. The attack constitutes the first...
The International Humanitarian Fact-Finding Commission and Gaza – How is it Involved?
On 20 June 2024, the government of the Republic of Poland signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the International Humanitarian Fact-Finding Commission (IHFFC) regarding the incident on April 1, 2024 in the Gaza Strip during which seven people working with the...
Protecting Schools in Armed Conflict
In early July 2024, the BBC reported that the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) had conducted an air strike on a school in the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza. According to Palestinian sources, sixteen people were killed, with dozens more injured in the attack on the...
Lieber Studies Making and Shaping LOAC Volume – The Application of LOAC in Domestic Courts and the Question of Expertise
Editors’ note: This post is based on the author’s chapter in Making and Shaping the Law of Armed Conflict (Sandesh Sivakumaran and Christian R. Burne eds. 2024), the tenth volume of the Lieber Studies Series published with Oxford University Press. The South Africa v....
Israel – Hamas 2024 Symposium – The Gospel, Lavender, and the Law of Armed Conflict
In November 2023, +972 Magazine and Local Call published a joint report on Israel Defense Force (IDF) targeting operations, labeling them a “mass assassination factory.” It correctly stated that the IDF was using “Gospel,” a system characterized as relying upon...
Israel-Hamas 2024 Symposium – AI-Based Targeting in Gaza: Surveying Expert Responses and Refining the Debate
The reported use of artificial intelligence-enabled decision-support systems (AI-DSS), in particular the Gospel and Lavender, by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) in their military operations in Gaza has been controversial. Allegedly, these two systems are used to...
