Respecting enemies to protect civilians

By almost any measure from the battlefields of the world’s major current wars, the global rules for protecting innocent civilians in conflict seem to be losing their force. Russia pounded more than 30 towns and villages over the weekend, opening a new front in northeastern Ukraine. A year-old civil war in Sudan has displaced 8.2 million people.

On Friday, the Biden administration reported to Congress that Israel has likely violated international humanitarian law in its military response to the Oct. 7 attack, during which Hamas militants killed roughly 1,200 Israelis and took more than 250 hostages. The report documents the use of weapons supplied by the United States in Israeli strikes against civilian targets and aid workers during its seven-month war in Gaza. It also indicates a failure to protect innocent Palestinians from attacks by Israeli settlers in the West Bank and mistreatment of Palestinians held in Israeli prisons.

The report marks a rare rebuke of a strategic ally. But in its finer detail, it also captures how individual countries and the international community are learning to adapt the rules for protecting civilians to the evolving nature of war and those who fight it. It describes efforts Israeli forces have taken to minimize civilian harm while pursuing an enemy shielding itself within residential buildings, schools, and hospitals. It cites military and civilian investigations of alleged war crimes.

The report also chronicles how other recipients of U.S. weaponry such as Colombia, Kenya, and Nigeria are working to instill in their militaries respect for civilian command and protection of civilians. Those efforts are not exceptions. “The notion that wars are ruled exclusively by chaos and disorder hardly reflects today’s empirical reality,” wrote Ezequiel Heffes, director of Watchlist on Children and Armed Conflict, in Just Security during the height of Ethiopia’s civil war in 2022.

One reason for this, Dr. Heffes noted, is a growing trend among civil society groups, academics, and international peacemakers to educate states and nonstate actors like terrorist groups and guerrilla movements in international laws to protect civilians. That work involves promoting human safety by cultivating empathy among belligerents. As the International Committee of the Red Cross noted in March, sowing respect for international law requires preserving “the humanity of the enemy.”

Turki bin Abdullah Al Mahmoud, director of the Human Rights Department at the Qatari Ministry of Foreign Affairs and a mediator in peace talks between Israel and Hamas, agreed. “The more skill, the more knowledge, the more information, and the more background about the conflict itself the mediator has, the longer-term solution we can reach,” he told a recent seminar hosted by Georgetown University.

“As full of holes as it is, the rules-based order is the best model we’ve come up with, civilizationally, to reduce widespread war and conflict,” wrote H.A. Hellyer, a senior associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute in London, in Foreign Policy magazine. The Biden report has drawn criticism for being both too harsh and too soft at a time of growing concern of Israel’s military conduct in Gaza. But its sober balance fits a global trend in setting justice and protection for innocent people on a foundation of understanding rather than condemnation.