1/ Within hours of Hamas' incursions, Israel instituted a blockade of food, water, fuel, power and medical supplies to the Gaza Strip - a collective punishment of the Strip's population in response to the raid by a few hundred militants, and a war crime.

2/ Three key principles of international humanitarian law apply where combatants or military objectives and civilians are caught together in hostile exchanges: those of distinction; precaution and proportionality. These prohibit generalized area targetting.

The Israeli Defence Force (IDF) has repeatedly attacked civilian infrastructure across the Gaza Strip: water treatment and UN facilities, warehouse units, schools, hospitals, retail businesses and places of worship. At the time of writing this (mid-December 2023), the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) had recorded over 60% of housing units as destroyed. More than eighteen thousand Palestinian fatalities had occurred since the Israeli operation began, at least an estimated two-thirds of whom are women and children.

3/ Subsequent to instruction issued by the IDF of imminent military engagement, over 1.9 million Gazans have been induced to leave their homes (some 85% of the Gazan population). Forcible transfer of civilian populations is prohibited under customary international law, barring imperative military justification. The International Committee of the Red Cross has assessed 'instructions issued by the Israeli authorities for the population of Gaza City to immediately leave their homes' as incompatible with international humanitarian law, while UN Special Rapporteurs have variously identified unfeasible evacuation orders under conditions of complete siege as war crimes.

4/ A plethora of declarations of intended objectives, emanating from senior Israeli government ministers and IDF military officers, has been classified as constituting a serious risk of the commission of the crime of genocide by nine UN Special Rapporteurs. Undertakings to implement wholesale destruction, to prioritise damage at the expense of the principles of precaution and distinction, and to render Gaza uninhabitable have exposed the IDF's campaign as wilfully negligent of abiding by fundamental principles of international law.

The IDF's application of a 'state of necessity', in law to be relied upon as an exceptional measure required to safeguard an essential state interest, has been repeatedly spelt out as the total destruction of Hamas - the goal of a strategic campaign. However, Israel does not recognise that the attacks against it, which occurred within formally occupied territory, are imputable to a foreign state (which would justify, under Article 51 of the United Nations Charter, the claimed right to self-defence). Hamas itself has evolved over decades as a broadly-based social and governmental movement embodying a liberation ideology, democratically-elected at the last polls to take place in the Gaza Strip in 2006. To many observers, the mismatch between a grave and imminent peril, and an extended military campaign, is glaringly evident, since the objective entails the dismantling by overwhelming force of arms of Palestinian civil society. To German Chancellor Olav Scholz, however, the comparison is "absurd", continuing: "Israel is a democracy - this has to be said very clearly", but without mentioning its administration of an apartheid polity between 'the River and the Sea'.