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For over nine months now, the United States and other close allies of Israel have repeatedly defended the conduct of the Israeli army in Gaza and the West Bank. They have rejected or ignored accusations of genocide, torture, collective punishment and other war crimes and crimes against humanity, despite numerous reports by UN experts and human rights organisations detailing various atrocities.

In defending the Israeli army, Israeli allies often refer to the opportunity to seek justice for crimes in Israeli courts. In its response to International Criminal Court's Prosecutor Karim Khan seeking arrest warrants for Israeli officials, the US State Department, for example, has claimed that the prosecutor did not defer to a national investigation first. The Israeli government has also made the same argument.

But a closer look at the Israeli judicial system reveals that such prosecution of justice for war crimes committed by Israeli officials is unlikely to yield results.

Israel's legislative and judicial authorities do recognise international law and conventions. However, through legal exceptions, they also create spaces for the total disregard of international law by Israeli officials and security and military forces. This erodes the prohibitions from international law on matters of grave importance.

Two examples of crimes that illustrate this legal contradiction between Israeli jurisprudence and international law are torture and collective punishment.

Torture is unequivocally illegal under international humanitarian law and international human rights law. This prohibition derives from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Geneva Conventions and its Additional Protocols, the Convention against Torture, etc.

Based on paragraph 277 of the 1977 Israeli Penal Code and the 1991 Israeli ratification of the Convention Against Torture, the Israeli legal system recognises torture as illegal. But in reality, the practice of torture has been extensively documented by Israeli NGOs and Israeli media, and it remains without any legal repercussions. In the past nine months, this illegal practice has even intensified, according to human rights activists....


​Read the full opinion at Al-Jazeera