Israel Can “Legally” Kill Babies Because the Laws of War Are Immoral

However, we can also evaluate aggregate proportionality even if such an analysis has only moral rather than legal weight. Depending on whose numbers you believe, Israel has killed between 16 and 35 innocent civilians for each of the 1,200 people killed in the Hamas October 7 attack that started the war. And those numbers do not include the ongoing death toll or the Israeli use of famine as a weapon of war in Gaza, where more than one million people are in a desperate battle against starvation.

Of course, the sheer scale of these statistics obscures the horror of what it means for a child to be buried or burned alive, or to undergo an amputation of an arm or a leg without anesthetic. It does not convey how entire bloodlines have been eliminated, or how families must survive afterward without a breadwinner, homeless, facing the prospect of forced migration and a lifetime of psychological trauma. Nor does it account for the Israeli families murdered in the comfort of their own homes, gunned down fleeing in terror at the Re’im music festival, and the women sexually assaulted by Hamas militants. The fact is, war is a crime committed against every dead civilian, no matter their nationality.

This debate over numbers is itself a propaganda technique that sows confusion and apathy. We have become numb to the fact that our democratically elected officials regularly lie to us. Particularly in war, truth becomes another casualty in the pursuit of military victory, as anyone who lived during the aftermath of 9/11 can attest. When those lies are eventually unearthed, like the bodies in a mass grave, it is too late for them to matter.