On March 24, Israel struck a car in northern Gaza and killed Al Jazeera correspondent Hossam Shabat.

The 23-year-old is one of countless civilians – men, women and children – Israel has killed since launching what legal scholars describe as a “genocidal” war on Gaza.

Israel often justifies its killings by claiming that the targets are people sympathetic or affiliated with Hamas or other armed factions. This was the justification given for killing Shabat.

Israel also regularly destroys entire neighbourhoods and buildings, killing dozens – often hundreds – at a time, ostensibly to target a single Hamas operative.

For years, Israel has tried to justify these practices by employing lawyers to create shadowy quasi-legal concepts in the hope of establishing new, dangerous precedents, according to legal scholars and experts.

However, legal scholars told Al Jazeera that neither so-called “targeted killings” nor disproportionate attacks against civilians have any grounding in international law.

“Is there any semblance of law or legal justification for the war tactics Israel is using in Gaza? The simple answer is no. There isn’t,” said Heidi Matthews, assistant professor of law at York University in Toronto, Canada.

Setting precedents

On September 28, 2000, Palestinians across the occupied West Bank and Gaza began demonstrating against Israel’s ever-entrenching occupation in what became known as the second Intifada.

Israel’s repression of the Intifada quickly prompted Palestinians to mobilise and fight back.

Over the next five years, Israel launched what it named “targeted killings”, assassinating unarmed Palestinians.

Israel claimed that these targets could pose a threat to Israelis in the future because of their alleged membership in an armed faction.

“Israel … strips protection from civilians based on their views or perspectives,” said Noor Kilzi, a researcher with Legal Agenda, a nonprofit in Lebanon that advocates for legal reform and human rights in the Middle East.

Israel’s concept of targeted killings laid out a blueprint which the United States adapted during its “war on terror”, analysts told Al Jazeera.

“[In the early 2000s] Israel and the US changed their legal doctrines and implemented that as part of their military dogma,” York University’s Matthews told Al Jazeera.

“When it came to distinguishing between civilians and combatants… the US and Israel began to view [anyone as a target] based on their membership to a group,” she added.

According to the International Committee of the Red Cross, a person is only a legitimate target if they are directly engaged in armed combat at the time they are killed.

This means that suspected membership in an armed group is not a sufficient basis to assassinate someone.

Leiber’s legacy?

Throughout Israel’s war on Gaza, it has routinely dropped 2,000lb (900kg) bombs in densely populated residential areas, as well as systematically targeted schools, hospitals and displacement shelters.

Israeli officials justify these attacks by claiming that Israel is fighting a “just war” against barbarians. As a result, the ostensible goal of destroying Hamas outweighs minimising civilian casualties.

This is rooted partly in the philosophy of Francis Leiber, a 19th-century German American military theorist, who was tasked with setting out the “rules of conduct” for Unionist soldiers fighting the Confederates in the US Civil War.

He argued that some wars are vital to the moral progress of civilised nations and require a quick victory, which can only be achieved using tactics that will likely cause huge civilian casualties.

“Leiber basically said that whatever is militarily necessary to carry out war is legal,” Alonso Gurmendi Dunkelberg, a legal scholar at the London School of Economics, told Al Jazeera.

This terrifying reasoning is blatantly at odds with international norms and laws, Gurmendi Dunkelberg added.

“He believed in killing as many people as you can, so that you finish the job quickly. He believed that was more humane than trying to protect people to the point that the war drags on for say 15 years,” he said.

Since the beginning of Israel’s war on Gaza, its spokespeople have made similar arguments.

Mark Regev, an adviser to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, said the goal was to “get the [war] done quicker” when asked by PBS about why Israel had dropped 6,000 bombs in the first six days of attacks on the besieged enclave.

Then spokesperson for the Israeli army, Daniel Hagari, also admitted during the first days of the war that the emphasis in Gaza was on “damage and not accuracy”.

Destroying the system

In November 2024, the International Criminal Court (ICC) approved two arrest warrants for Netanyahu and his then-Defence Minister Yoav Gallant – accused of using starvation as a weapon of war and deliberately attacking civilians in Gaza.

An earlier ruling by the International Court of Justice found that Palestinians in Gaza faced a real risk of genocide due to Israel’s war practices.

The rulings by the ICC and ICJ add weight to the argument that Israel has failed in trying to legally justify its war practices, which likely amount to multiple war crimes, crimes against humanity and even genocide.

As a result, Israel and its western allies are now trying to sabotage the very institutions that were created to uphold international law and prosecute perpetrators of atrocities, said Nadim Khoury, former director at Human Rights Watch and the founder of the Arab Reform Initiative think tank.

“Israel has clearly hit the limit of what they can get away with by using legal arguments. Now, they’re just acting with total impunity to undermine the institutions trying to enforce international laws,” he told Al Jazeera.

Several legal scholars and experts expressed dismay that Netanyahu may be able to visit countries in Europe that are parties to the Rome Statute, the legal framework underpinning the ICC.

Countries such as Hungary, Belgium and France have said they will not arrest Netanyahu if he visits their countries or passes through their land or airspace.

York University’s Matthews believes states that claim to uphold international law must act quickly to salvage what’s left of the system, acknowledging that it was never a perfect model.

“Other states – beyond America and Israel – need to take action to save or salvage the system as a whole, or it will fade away quickly,” she told Al Jazeera.

“We are at an inflection point and it doesn’t look good.”

About 1,000 current and retired Israeli Air Force pilots sign letter, saying Gaza war only serves ‘political interests’.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has denounced about 1,000 current and retired Israeli Air Force reservists, who signed a letter calling for an end to the war in Gaza, referring to them as “marginal and extremist”, while expressing support for the serving pilots’ dismissal.

In a statement posted on X on Thursday, Netanyahu’s office said the prime minister “backs the decision” of the defence minister and the Israeli military chief of staff “to dismiss those who signed the letter”.

The document, which ignited a political uproar in Israel, urged all Israeli citizens to demand an end to the war, warning that the bombardment of Gaza puts Israeli captives held in the enclave at risk.

“As has been proven in the past, only a [ceasefire] deal can bring back the hostages safely, while military pressure mainly leads to the killing of the hostages and the endangerment of our soldiers,” the soldiers said.

“Currently, the war serves mainly political and personal interests, not security interests,” the document added.

Netanyahu said “expressions that weaken” the military “and strengthen our enemies in wartime are unforgiveable”.

“This is a marginal and extremist group that is again trying to break Israeli society from within,” he added, accusing them of trying to topple the government. “They already tried to do this before October 7 and Hamas interpreted the call to refuse to serve as weakness.”

According to Israeli media, the letter does not call for a general refusal to serve but rather urges Israeli officials to prioritise the release of captives rather than pursuing the deadly war.

The Israeli newspaper Haaretz said the signatories include many active reservists, including senior officers and pilots, as well as others who are no longer in active reserve duty.

The report added that after the document was leaked, military officials called the signatories and urged them to retract, on orders from Israeli Air Force commander Tomer Bar.

Bar also threatened the reservist pilots who signed the letter would be barred from serving, according to Israel’s public broadcaster Kan.

Haaretz said only 25 retracted their signatures while eight more signed in protest.

The newspaper later reported that Israel’s Military Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir and the Air Force’s Bar have decided to dismiss the reservists.

It is unclear when the dismissal would take effect.

Critics have accused Netanyahu of prolonging the war in a bid to keep his cabinet intact and stay as prime minister.

Families of Israeli captives and their supporters have also been urging Netanyahu to reach a ceasefire with Hamas and pave the way for the captives’ release.

Gaza’s Health Ministry says at least 50,846 Palestinians are confirmed dead and 115,729 wounded in Israel’s war on Gaza. The enclave’s Government Media Office updated its death toll to more than 61,700, saying thousands of people missing under the rubble are presumed dead.

One of the Strip’s largest universities, the Islamic University of Gaza in Gaza City had about 17,000 students before the war, studying everything from medicine and chemistry to literature and commerce. More than 60 percent of the students were women.

But now, any sense that the place was once a university is gone.

After 18 months of Israeli bombardment that killed more than 50,000 people in the enclave, the main auditorium is a gutted, burned-out wreck. Giant holes have been blasted through its blackened walls. The banks of seats are mangled and twisted.

The campus has become a refuge for hundreds of families in northern Gaza since Israel broke a ceasefire on March 18 and relaunched the war.

Families have set up tents in lecture halls and classrooms. They take books from the library and burn them in cooking fires because they have no fuel. Children run around in gardens reduced to fields of debris and mounds of earth.

A makeshift market has been set up under the archway of the main gate.

Their struggle to survive has worsened because Israel has cut off the entry of food, fuel, medicine and all other goods into Gaza for more than a month, straining the limited supplies of aid agencies on which nearly the entire population relies.