IHL | The Law of Armed Conflict (LOAC)

by Travis Normand
November 7, 2023

This is a summary of (some) the substance found in two other articles, one of which I have posted/shared previously. You can find both of these articles, in their entirety, posted here:

(1) “Israel – Hamas 2023 Symposium – Strategy and Self-Defence: Israel and its war withI Iran,“ by Ken Watkin, posted on October 18, 2023; at the Articles of War / Lieber Institute at West Point, found here: https://lieber.westpoint.edu/strategy-self-defence-israel-its-war-with-iran/
(2) “Israel – Hamas 2023 Symposium – The Legal. Context of Operations Al-Aqsa Flood and Swords of Iron,” by Michael Schmitt, posted on October 10, 2023; at the Articles of War / Lieber Institute at West Point, found here: https://lieber.westpoint.edu/legal-context-operations-al-aqsa-flood-swords-of-iron/

The article by Ken Watkin dives into a lot of interesting topics (including whether this conflict could be classified as an IAC; depending on the degree of support, if any, Iran is providing to Hamas); but my point here in this post is to examine the question of whether the current conflict between Israel and Hamas is a NIAC or IAC. I am doing so by summarizing what is in the two articles posted above.

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by Travis Normand

I stumbled upon the following quote and thought it was highly relevant to the study of the LOAC.

[Emphasis Added]

This week I have been doing some reading for a class I’m taking at ESR called Images of God. While studying the image of God as Warrior my class read an article by an Old Testament professor at Harvard, Paul Hanson, who wrote about the concept of Peace as Shalom in the early Old Testament. This concept doesn’t translate directly into the way we use the English version of it. Hanson said many interesting things -among them that the opposite of peace is not war. It is chaos. Webster’s Dictionary gives a definition of “chaos” as a word that means the disorder of formless matter and infinite space. Hanson described the ancient Israelites sharing with their neighbors over the cook pot, their basic view that the world was situated precariously between order and chaos. Order is defined as a life-enhancing condition which the creator God maintains by holding the unruly forces of chaos in check. [1]

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Is the current conflict between Israel and Hamas a NIAC or IAC?

The opposite of peace is chaos, not war.