How the ICC is encouraging greater civilian casualties

"March 16 was the deadline for filing briefs on whether the International Criminal Court should recognize Palestine as a state. But important though that question is, the ICC prosecutor's decision to open a criminal investigation against Israel poses a much bigger problem: Contrary to the court's stated mission of trying to reduce the harm caused by war, it may well result in even higher casualties and more extensive property damage.

Like all Western countries, Israel makes great efforts to uphold customary laws of war, including by trying to minimize civilian casualties. As a group of high-ranking Western military experts wrote in a report on the Hamas-Israel war of 2014, Israel "met and in some respects exceeded the highest standards we set for our own nations' militaries." In fact, Israel has historically caused fewer civilian casualties and less property damage than other Western armies...

But now, ICC prosecutor Fatou Bensouda has declared that all the IDF's efforts were worthless: In her view, it committed prima facie war crimes both during the 2014 war and in subsequent military operations in the Gaza Strip. In other words, meeting or even exceeding the West's "highest standards" is no longer enough to keep you out of legal trouble...

All law is based on two fundamental principles: that compliance is possible without leaving yourself or your country vulnerable to destruction; and that compliance protects you from legal trouble. If those two criteria aren't met, nobody would have any reason to obey the law.

The ICC's decision to prosecute Israel eviscerates both those principles. And as such, it's liable to destroy the very international law it was created to uphold."