'Violations' of the laws of war set a dangerous precedent, humanitarians denounce

Photo: Jaardar Ashtiyeh Agence France-Presse The Palestinian Red Crescent has more than 900 employees and several thousand volunteers in Gaza.

Nina Larson – Agence France-Presse in Geneva

Published at 1:29 p.m.

• Middle East

'Egregious' violations of the laws of war in the escalating Middle East conflict are setting a dangerous precedent, aid workers in the region warn.

Since the deadly attack by the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas on Israeli soil on October 7, 2023 and the Israeli response, aid workers say the warring parties are flouting international humanitarian law.

“The rules of war are being violated so blatantly” that it “sets a precedent that we have not seen in any other conflict,” Palestinian Red Crescent Vice President Marwan Jilani told AFP.

On the sidelines of his participation in a meeting of the 191 national Red Cross and Red Crescent societies in Geneva last week, he denounced the existence of this “total disregard” for international humanitarian law.

As Israel wages a devastating retaliatory operation in the Gaza Strip, local aid workers are struggling to deliver aid while being exposed to the same risks as the rest of the population, he said.

The Palestinian Red Crescent has more than 900 staff and several thousand volunteers in Gaza, where more than 43,000 Palestinians have been killed, according to the Hamas government's health ministry, since the start of the war with Israel.

“They are part of the community. They have been displaced many times,” Jilani said, adding: “I think every one of our staff members has lost family members.”

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He decried in particular the “deliberate targeting of the health sector.” Israel rejects these accusations, saying it conducts its military operations in Gaza and Lebanon in accordance with international law.

“Broken Barrier”

But according to Mr. Jilani, “many staff members” of the Palestinian Red Crescent, “including doctors and nurses, have been detained, taken away for weeks and tortured.”

Since the start of the Gaza war, 34 Palestinian Red Crescent staff and volunteers have been killed in the small Palestinian territory, and two more in the West Bank, “most of them while on duty,” he said.

Four other staff members remain detained, their fate unknown.

For Mr. Jilani, the disregard for basic international law in the conflict is eroding belief in the very existence of such laws. A “great casualty of this war,” he said, “is the belief in the Middle East that there is no international law.”

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Uri Shacham, chief of staff of Magen David Adom, Israel’s equivalent of the Red Cross, also decried the total disregard for international laws that require the protection of humanitarians.

In the October 7 Hamas attack, which killed 1,206 people, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli data, Magen David Adom staff and volunteers who rushed to the scene to provide aid were also killed, he said.

The organization lost seven people that day, “while they were treating others people” and “were identified as humanitarians,” Mr. Shacham said.

“Our biggest concern is that once the barrier is broken, others could do the same thing,” he warned.

“Similar scenario”

The Lebanese Red Cross, where Israel launched ground operations and stepped up airstrikes against Hezbollah about a month ago, also condemned the trend.

Thirteen of its volunteers were recently injured during ambulance missions.

One of its top officials, Samar Abou Jaoudeh, told AFP that the attacks did not appear to target the

“Nevertheless, the fact that the wounded are not reached and that the strikes fall right in front of an ambulance also does not respect international humanitarian law,” she said.

And she fears that Lebanon, where at least 1,620 people have been killed since September 23, according to an AFP tally based on official data, could suffer the same fate as Gaza.

“We hope that no country will face what is happening in Gaza now, but the scenario is starting to look similar in Lebanon,” she said, asserting that the Lebanese Red Cross was preparing “for all scenarios.”