The world is witnessing the systematic unravelling of humanity’s most fundamental principles in Gaza: a total erosion of international law and a blatant disregard for the rules of war. Beyond the immediate humanitarian catastrophe, a more insidious trend is unfolding, threatening the main principles of International Humanitarian Law (IHL).
In March 2024, United Nations Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese, in her report Anatomy of a Genocide, exposed Israel’s use of “Humanitarian Camouflage”, a tactic that exploits legal and humanitarian rhetoric to mask genocidal intent and actions. This deliberate distortion of International Law enables the perpetuation of violence while evading accountability.
The concept is further dissected in the article Humanitarian Camouflage: Israel Rewrites the Laws of War to Legitimize Genocide in Gaza, co-authored by legal scholars Luigi Daniele, Nicola Perugini (also academic advisors to the Special Rapporteur’s mandate), and Albanese. Their analysis reveals how Israel weaponizes the relevant rules to reframe war crimes and crimes against humanity, systematically dismantling the protections enshrined in IHL. This strategic manipulation not only accelerates the destruction in Gaza but also sets a dangerous precedent for conflict zones worldwide. By rebranding genocidal patterns of unlawful attacks as justifiable in armed conflicts, it undermines the very foundations of global justice and imperils vulnerable populations everywhere.
GHRD had the privilege to have an insightful conversation with Professor Luigi Daniele regarding this concept and to dive deeper into all the issues that the ongoing genocide is raising and will potentially raise even more in the future. Dr. Luigi Daniele teaches and researches international humanitarian law and international criminal law at the University of Molise, Italy. His research focuses on the law of targeting, war crimes law, and the proposed crime of ecocide. His latest contributions concerned the misuses of the notion of ‘collateral damage’, the crisis and changing landscape of genocide studies (with R. Segal), and the war crimes of destruction and appropriation of property not justified by military necessity. He is the author of the forthcoming Indiscriminate and Disproportionate Attacks in International Law: Bridging the Accountability Gap (Hart Publishing, 2025).
Introducing humanitarian camouflage, it is first necessary to understand what the experts meant when they developed this concept, as Israel’s strategy of rewriting the basic rules of international humanitarian law to fit and legalize practices of genocidal elimination of the Palestinian population and destruction of the infrastructure indispensable for its collective survival. In Professor Daniele’s words:
The camouflage of genocide as an IHL-compliant waging of war represents the last stage of an older tendency. We have witnessed, in the last 15 years, an attempt – even in the scholarly discourses – of using IHL not as a framework of civilian protection but one progressively expanding Israel’s leeway in killing civilians. For more than a decade, Palestinian civilians killed by the IDF in each cyclical bombardment of Gaza were presumed to be lawfully, or at least ‘proportionally’, killed collaterally. This tendency has enabled the current comouflage, a concept we use to indicate the racializing resignification of words taken from the IHL legal framework, emptied of their protective purpose, disassembled from their normative context, and reassembled in something entirely different conceived to accommodate annihilatory means and methods of warfare, to legalize a genocidal war. In this pseudo-legal creature, single strikes knowingly killing, each, hundreds of civilians and children are characterized as calculated, lawful collateral damage. Any measure of conscious killing of civilians by the attackers, in addition, is represented as the fault of the forces under attack, due to their use of ‘human shields’. ‘Collateral’ and ‘shields’ are just two tools of this discourse, but its overall function is ultimately that of conferring a semblance of destroyable proximity to lawful targets of every Palestinian civilian, children, of every infrastructure sustaining life, and every object indispensable for Palestinian collective survival in Gaza.
Even though some similarities between the situation in Gaza and other genocides exist, the appropriation and distortion of IHL to justify and vindicate as lawful what is prohibited under IHL, and indeed criminalized under ICL, is a new phenomenon. There is something that makes what is happening in Gaza unprecedented, and it stems from the substantial complicity, from a moral and political point of view, of Western powers. What Professor Daniele underscored as unique is the so-called “whitewashing” of the massacres, with Western executives adopting and reproducing key words of the Israeli camouflage, as well as the lethality of the attacks, in particular, for children. Additionally, a new profile is the readiness of branches of Western military forces to import very similar conceptions, sponsored as crucial to win future wars between big powers, considered existential. These segments of the military hierarchies are already implying that a scrupulous adherence to IHL would make those wars difficult to win. Consequently, the Israeli genocidal distortions of the law of war, if unpunished, are capable of being exported and trigger a pattern of exterminations in future armed conflicts everywhere. It should instead be remembered that the Genocide Convention applies entirely, and probably more crucially than in peacetime, to armed conflicts. If we admit that IHL is transformed into a tool to exterminate civilians under pretences of legality, then any power will claim the same.
Another important aspect is that, legally speaking, what constitutes a military objective under IHL is not categorical but rather circumstantial, based on the specific circumstances ruling in the place and time of each specific attack. The Additional Protocols to the Geneva Conventions make clear that attacks should be “strictly limited” to objects which “by their nature, location, purpose or use make an effective contribution to military action,” and whose “total or partial destruction,” or “capture or neutralization,” in the circumstances ruling at the time, offers “a definite military advantage. However, this does not mean that suspicions or speculations by attackers about future military uses suffice to transform civilian objects into targets. What we are witnessing now in Gaza is the exact opposite application of this principle.
Representatively, the Israeli ambassador to the UK, during a famous interview, openly stated that “every school, every mosque, every second house has access to tunnels” and therefore is a military objective. When the interviewer noted that this was an argument to destroy all of Gaza, she replied that there was no other solution. This rhetoric has devastating consequences, as the Professor explained to us:
This presumptive categorization of every Palestinian object as a lawful target finds correspondence in Israeli official documents. Many civilian objects are described as only ‘apparently’ or ‘ostensibly’ civilian. In these documents, it is implied that — even in such a highly segregated and most densely populated area in the world as Gaza — any civilian object that has been touched, in the past, or may be touched, in the future, by Hamas, becomes a military objective.
The world is witnessing the systematic unravelling of humanity’s most fundamental principles in Gaza: a total erosion of international law and a blatant disregard for the rules of war. Beyond the immediate humanitarian catastrophe, a more insidious trend is unfolding, threatening the main principles of International Humanitarian Law (IHL).
In March 2024, United Nations Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese, in her report Anatomy of a Genocide, exposed Israel’s use of “Humanitarian Camouflage”, a tactic that exploits legal and humanitarian rhetoric to mask genocidal intent and actions. This deliberate distortion of International Law enables the perpetuation of violence while evading accountability.
The concept is further dissected in the article Humanitarian Camouflage: Israel Rewrites the Laws of War to Legitimize Genocide in Gaza, co-authored by legal scholars Luigi Daniele, Nicola Perugini (also academic advisors to the Special Rapporteur’s mandate), and Albanese. Their analysis reveals how Israel weaponizes the relevant rules to reframe war crimes and crimes against humanity, systematically dismantling the protections enshrined in IHL. This strategic manipulation not only accelerates the destruction in Gaza but also sets a dangerous precedent for conflict zones worldwide. By rebranding genocidal patterns of unlawful attacks as justifiable in armed conflicts, it undermines the very foundations of global justice and imperils vulnerable populations everywhere.
GHRD had the privilege to have an insightful conversation with Professor Luigi Daniele regarding this concept and to dive deeper into all the issues that the ongoing genocide is raising and will potentially raise even more in the future. Dr. Luigi Daniele teaches and researches international humanitarian law and international criminal law at the University of Molise, Italy. His research focuses on the law of targeting, war crimes law, and the proposed crime of ecocide. His latest contributions concerned the misuses of the notion of ‘collateral damage’, the crisis and changing landscape of genocide studies (with R. Segal), and the war crimes of destruction and appropriation of property not justified by military necessity. He is the author of the forthcoming Indiscriminate and Disproportionate Attacks in International Law: Bridging the Accountability Gap (Hart Publishing, 2025).
Introducing humanitarian camouflage, it is first necessary to understand what the experts meant when they developed this concept, as Israel’s strategy of rewriting the basic rules of international humanitarian law to fit and legalize practices of genocidal elimination of the Palestinian population and destruction of the infrastructure indispensable for its collective survival. In Professor Daniele’s words:
The camouflage of genocide as an IHL-compliant waging of war represents the last stage of an older tendency. We have witnessed, in the last 15 years, an attempt – even in the scholarly discourses – of using IHL not as a framework of civilian protection but one progressively expanding Israel’s leeway in killing civilians. For more than a decade, Palestinian civilians killed by the IDF in each cyclical bombardment of Gaza were presumed to be lawfully, or at least ‘proportionally’, killed collaterally. This tendency has enabled the current comouflage, a concept we use to indicate the racializing resignification of words taken from the IHL legal framework, emptied of their protective purpose, disassembled from their normative context, and reassembled in something entirely different conceived to accommodate annihilatory means and methods of warfare, to legalize a genocidal war. In this pseudo-legal creature, single strikes knowingly killing, each, hundreds of civilians and children are characterized as calculated, lawful collateral damage. Any measure of conscious killing of civilians by the attackers, in addition, is represented as the fault of the forces under attack, due to their use of ‘human shields’. ‘Collateral’ and ‘shields’ are just two tools of this discourse, but its overall function is ultimately that of conferring a semblance of destroyable proximity to lawful targets of every Palestinian civilian, children, of every infrastructure sustaining life, and every object indispensable for Palestinian collective survival in Gaza.
Even though some similarities between the situation in Gaza and other genocides exist, the appropriation and distortion of IHL to justify and vindicate as lawful what is prohibited under IHL, and indeed criminalized under ICL, is a new phenomenon. There is something that makes what is happening in Gaza unprecedented, and it stems from the substantial complicity, from a moral and political point of view, of Western powers. What Professor Daniele underscored as unique is the so-called “whitewashing” of the massacres, with Western executives adopting and reproducing key words of the Israeli camouflage, as well as the lethality of the attacks, in particular, for children. Additionally, a new profile is the readiness of branches of Western military forces to import very similar conceptions, sponsored as crucial to win future wars between big powers, considered existential. These segments of the military hierarchies are already implying that a scrupulous adherence to IHL would make those wars difficult to win. Consequently, the Israeli genocidal distortions of the law of war, if unpunished, are capable of being exported and trigger a pattern of exterminations in future armed conflicts everywhere. It should instead be remembered that the Genocide Convention applies entirely, and probably more crucially than in peacetime, to armed conflicts. If we admit that IHL is transformed into a tool to exterminate civilians under pretences of legality, then any power will claim the same.
Another important aspect is that, legally speaking, what constitutes a military objective under IHL is not categorical but rather circumstantial, based on the specific circumstances ruling in the place and time of each specific attack. The Additional Protocols to the Geneva Conventions make clear that attacks should be “strictly limited” to objects which “by their nature, location, purpose or use make an effective contribution to military action,” and whose “total or partial destruction,” or “capture or neutralization,” in the circumstances ruling at the time, offers “a definite military advantage. However, this does not mean that suspicions or speculations by attackers about future military uses suffice to transform civilian objects into targets. What we are witnessing now in Gaza is the exact opposite application of this principle.
Representatively, the Israeli ambassador to the UK, during a famous interview, openly stated that “every school, every mosque, every second house has access to tunnels” and therefore is a military objective. When the interviewer noted that this was an argument to destroy all of Gaza, she replied that there was no other solution. This rhetoric has devastating consequences, as the Professor explained to us:
This presumptive categorization of every Palestinian object as a lawful target finds correspondence in Israeli official documents. Many civilian objects are described as only ‘apparently’ or ‘ostensibly’ civilian. In these documents, it is implied that — even in such a highly segregated and most densely populated area in the world as Gaza — any civilian object that has been touched, in the past, or may be touched, in the future, by Hamas, becomes a military objective.
See for reference how, for example, Germany justified Israel killing 100 people at the Gaza school shelter, at: https://www.trtworld.com/middle-east/germany-justifies-israel-killing-100-people-at-gaza-school-shelter-18194979
It is worth mentioning that IHL provides a special protection of children in hostilities, see International Committee of the Red Cross fact sheet on children’s legal protection, at: https://www.icrc.org/sites/default/files/document/file_list/children-legal-protection-factsheet.pdf
See https://www.aa.com.tr/en/europe/israeli-ambassador-to-uk-claims-gaza-mosques-schools-have-access-to-tunnels/3100236; The Ambassador’s intervention can be seen at: https://x.com/FredericKanoute/status/1742817729566876043
This is how Israel has preposterously tried to justify, for example, the controlled demolition of entire civilian neighborhoods of the Strip already controlled by the Israel Defence Forces [IDF]. The circumstantial determination of the status (civilian or military) of objects, in this way, is exploited to entirely circumvent the legal criteria to determine what constitutes a military objective. What this produces is an à la carte militarization of everything the IDF intends to target, activated upon will by unsupported claims acritically accepted by media and Western allies. The combined effect of this à la carte militarization of every civilian object, plus the discount of any evidence by Western allies whenever human shields claims are levelled, together with the implausible expansion of the concept of collateral damage, is the production of a framework in which, even when a single lawful target may be effectively identified, everything and everyone around it becomes indistinguishable from it, an extension of it, or even subsumed by it. In practice, everything becomes part of a giant target as big as the whole of Gaza, exactly as the Ambassador synthesized. Homes, families, schools, and hospitals are all presented as having lost protection because Israel alleges so, turning war into the systematic erasure of cities, and in general, of the living space and the chances of survival of the victim group in its land. Gaza today doesn’t exist anymore, as well as a substantial part of its population. This was the whole point of this doctrine.
This militarization of civilian objects clearly nullifies the rule of proportionality, with its prohibition of ‘excessiveness’ of the incidental harm to civilians and/ or civilian objects. In Gaza, we are witnessing what the authors in their article define as a “genocidal retranslation of proportionality,” even in relation to protected civilians, where the conscious mass killing of Palestinians becomes just an ‘unfortunate but proportionate’ cost of Israel’s military advantage. When assessing this topic with the Professor, a concerning element emerged, as in the view of the Israeli military, by express statement of its legal documents, the military advantage to be weighed in the proportionality assessment of each attack can be the advantage resulting overall from the entirety of a military operation. In this perspective, instead of weighing against each other the advantage pursued in each attack with the civilian harm the attack itself will cause, the IDF proportionality assessment becomes an exterminatory one. In fact, by weighing on one side of the ‘scales’ of proportionality such an all-encompassing value as the overall aim of the war – a war that is considered existential – then obviously there will be virtually no entity of mass killing and injuring or Palestinian civilians, and/or mass destructions of civilian objects, that will ever be considered disproportionate. “It is like using a ten-storey building as a counterweight on scales meant to weigh apples,” Daniele suggests.
The specific genocidal pattern of the assault on Gaza has also revealed a peculiar nature of it, which the authors of the article in analysis have framed as a settler-colonial genocide. We asked the Professor what we mean when we talk about this settler colonial nature.
Genocides with the function of depopulating a territory for relocating in those territories members of the colonizing group, removing the indigenous population, is something that, as Europeans, we have done for centuries. For settler colonial societies, the existence of the indigenous population is, in itself, unacceptable. And this idea is clearly stated by, for example, Israeli ministers like Smotrich, declaring publicly that Palestinians are an invention, ‘do not exist.’ These claims posed the logical premises of the destruction of their identity and material existence. Indigenous people’s very existence demonstrates the colonial nature of settler-colonial endeavours. In this scheme, the perpetrators represent themselves as being forced to destroy the victim group to ensure their own survival, and this belief is accompanied by a blame-shifting obsession: the same
See https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/3/20/palestinians-an-invention-of-past-century-israel-smotrich
victim groups perceived as undeservedly existing are then considered responsible for their own elimination. This ideological mantra is now self-evident and documented in hundreds of Israeli executive and military statements on Palestinians.
This ideology translates into reality, realizes its mission, and produces humanitarian camouflage as cover, as shown also by the allegation that every single Palestinian in Gaza is a human shield. As the Professor clarified, there is no legal basis to use the notion of human shields for an entire population or the entirety of the healthcare sector of a territory. The prohibition of the use of human shields is also circumstantial, so those who rely on the allegation need to demonstrate how many, if any, civilians were used as shields, when and where, to render which lawful targets immune from strikes. Instead, politicians are stating openly that Hamas transformed ‘the entirety of the Palestinian people’ into a human shield, turning the prohibition into a genocidal trope, as analysed by Gordon and Perugini. Colonialist racialization, then, completes the frame, enabling the presumption that whenever Palestinians are killed in scores, they were all terrorists and human shields: a pre-justification for every civilian massacre, ready to be used.
When reflecting on the paradox where the law of armed conflict has offered Israel a range of lawful killing categories, distorted to maximize the killing of civilians, we asked Professor Daniele to try to foresee the future of our international system.
Not everything is lost, we have all the laws, we have arrest warrants for war crimes and crimes against humanity, and the case before the ICJ, which, in my opinion, Israel will lose. In a short time, we shall have two advisory opinions, one already delivered on the unlawfulness of the Israeli occupation, and one soon on the criminal denial of the entry of aid. There have been legal achievements, but state governments have ignored them and even ignored jus cogens norms. Our problem is a political one, one of ruling classes and democracy, because Western accomplices of the Gaza genocide have ignored and subverted our democratic processes in their support for the Israeli crimes. If our institutions lack the will to halt the ongoing genocide, as the most elementary legal obligation they have, then the social contract is fundamentally broken. This failure exposes how boundaries meant to constrain political discretion in foreign policy have become blurred, undermining our ability to hold leaders accountable and weakening democratic oversight of foreign policy decisions. Yet, there are signs of a radical change, one that will mark the boundaries between historical seasons. Younger generations now know not only that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom and equal rights of Palestinians but also, more profoundly, that the same forces pursuing the erasure of Palestinians are those unmaking our democracies and transforming them into authoritarianisms of corporate and war profits.
*With heartfelt thanks to Professor Luigi Daniele for his time and generosity, his precious work on the Palestinian cause, and his steady commitment and passion for humanitarian law and its principles.
Sources and further readings
Albanese F. (2024, March 25). Anatomy of a Genocide, Report of the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, Francesca Albanese, UN Doc A/HRC/55/73.
https://digitallibrary.un.org/record/4060409
Daniele L., Perugini N., Albanese F. (2024). Humanitarian Camouflage: Israel Rewrites the Laws of War to Legitimize Genocide in Gaza
https://www.palestine-studies.org/en/node/1656283
Gordon N., Perugini N. (2020). Human Shields: A History of People in the Line of Fire. University of California Press
Gordon N., Perugini N. (2017). Distinction and the Ethics of Violence: On the Legal Construction of Liminal Subjects and Spaces. Antipode 49, no. 5
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/anti.12343
Gordon N., Perugini N (2014). On ‘human shielding’ in Gaza,” Al Jazeera https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2014/7/18/on-human-shielding-ingaza
Gordon N., Perugini N. (2016). The politics of human shielding: On the resignification of space and the constitution of civilians as shields in liberal wars. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 34, no. 1
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0263775815607478
