"The UN Human Rights Council's Independent Commission of Inquiry report on the 2014 Gaza war, released Monday, is a bad piece of work-bad in almost entirely predictable and boring ways, but no less bad for being bad and predictable. It is also no less important for being boring. Even if one has no great interest in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the standards and approaches the UN is embracing will not remain confined to that conflict. Israel is, as always, the canary in the IHL coal mine. Approaches that begin as a way of constraining Israeli military action quickly migrate to constraining U.S. military action. The effort by the Special Commission to find war crimes in civilian deaths in urban targeting situations in which non-uniformed fighters exploit civilians for combat cover is thus worth some attention...
The treatment of Hamas's tactics is not merely too pat in the commission's evaluation of Hamas's own behavior, it causes a fundamental error in the evaluation of much Israeli conduct too. The commission spends remarkably little ink evaluating the impact of Hamas's tactics on Israeli targeting decisions. Yet the two are intricately connected. The reason, after all, that Israeli strikes kill so many civilians is, at least in significant part, because Hamas uses civilian infrastructure as both base and hiding place. Yet just as Hamas's targeting practices are treated as a matter of some doubt, the commission also lets the group's defensive practices shift the responsibility for civilian death from Hamas's own behavior to Israeli targeting decisions...
In a more rigorous report, Hamas's tactics would be the fundamental lens through which Israeli conduct got analyzed. When one side systematically violates the rules designed to protect civilians, after all, and a lot of civilians then get killed, those systematic violations have to be central to the inquiry into the reasons for those civilian deaths. In this report, those systematic violations are an afterthought. And somewhat shockingly-and very tellingly-they are also entirely absent from the report's 'conclusions and recommendations...'"