Remember when this happened? It wasn’t long ago:

Bad move.

It’s a Geneva Convention law: nobody may be punished for an offence they have not personally committed and collective punishment is prohibited, as are pillages and the taking of hostages.

So: international law demands that civilians must not be harmed (certainly not deliberately).

This may come as a surprise to the European Union! And, indeed to this King’s Counsel, Jeremy Brier, who doesn’t seem to know the law as well as he should.

Also to the UK’s Foreign Secretary, who went on the record to say that he backs these war crimes that are clear violations of the Geneva Convention:

Sadly I must question whether the claim of an atrocity in a kibbutz near Gaza is an attempt to throw attention away from this.

I’m going to leave the last word – this time – to someone who experienced collective punishment as a person of Japanese ethnicity living in the United States during World War II, and went on to perform in a TV phenomenon that envisioned people of all colours, creeds and cultures living together in peace:

So to the question in the headline.

Not all people in Gaza are members of Hamas, and should not be punished for what Hamas has done. That much is clear, especially considering the fact that fully half of the population – a million people – are children.

But the Israeli government has declared that it is attacking everybody in Gaza indiscriminately, describing the population as “human animals”.

Is Israel committing war crimes, then?

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