Last week I attended a conference on “AI and the Law, on the Battlefield and in Cyberspace” organized by Academic Exchange and the Strauss Center for International Security and Law at the University of Texas, Austin. During the conference we received some updates about the situation in Israel and the Israeli efforts to comply with international law in their war against Hamas. Using rules of engagement and battlefield procedures similar to U.S. practices in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Israelis have been trying to balance their need to fight a terrorist enemy against legal and moral imperatives to protect noncombatants. Their approach contrasts sharply with the way Hamas attempts to both terrorize and murder Israelis on the one hand and to use Palestinians as human shields on the other hand. We might say that this is a “morally asymmetric” war because Hamas does not abide by any legal or moral scruples and in fact takes advantage of the fact that Israel does maintain such scruples in its own conduct. By placing its command posts and ammunition stores underneath civilian structures such as schools, mosques, and hospitals, Hamas, with the help of Iran, forces Israel to choose between pursuing its military goals and harming civilians. The asymmetric military advantage that Hamas enjoys consists in the fact that it would be clearly useless for Israel to employ similar human shields because Hamas would have absolutely no hesitation in killing Israeli civilians.

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