Shuhada Street in Hebron/al-Khalil (Photo: gettingoffthearmchair.wordpress.com)
At the end of 2008, Israel went to war on the Gaza Strip on a scale not seen in Palestine for decades. The Israeli military’s International Law Department had spent months prior crafting ‘legal advice that allowed for large numbers of civilian casualties’. This heralded the starting point of formal Palestinian interaction with the International Criminal Court, with an initial failed attempt by the Palestinian authorities to trigger ICC jurisdiction over crimes committed in occupied Palestine. It would be a long twelve years before eventually, in February and March 2021, the ICC’s Pre-Trial Chamber ruled that the Court does indeed have jurisdiction and the Prosecutor confirmed that an investigation will now proceed. Through these years, the Office of the Prosecutor often appeared at pains to draw out the wrangling over the preliminary question of whether it could accept jurisdictio
The international law on the use of force is one of the oldest branches of international law. It is an area twinned with the emergence of international law as a concept in itself, and which sees law and politics collide.
The number of armed conflicts is equal only to the number of methodological approaches used to describe them.
Many violent encounters are well known. The Kosovo Crisis in 1999 and the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 spring easily to the minds of most scholars and academics, and gain extensive coverage in this text. Other conflicts, including the Belgian operation in Stanleyville, and the Ethiopian Intervention in Somalia, are often overlooked to our peril. Ruys and Corten s expert-written text compares over sixty different instances of the use of cross border force since the adoption of the UN Charter in 1945, from all out warfare to hostile encounters between individual units, targeted killings, and hostage rescue operations, to ask a complex question. How much