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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 28, 2025

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I am not aware of any requirement that would need an exception to be made. Allowing neutral actors to provide humanitarian aid to civilians is one thing. Allowing hostile actors to aid and abet active combatants is something else entirely. As a credible case has been made that this falls under the latter rather than the former, I don't think there is any international law that actually requires the Israelis to do anything.

As a rule of thumb, international agreements never require states to do anything that would be to their strategic disadvantage. If they did then no state would ever agree to them in the first place. That's why they only ban weapons that are too impractical to actually use, like mustard gas and bioweapons. Nobody would ever seriously suggest banning stealth bombers or cruise missiles, because none of the states that have those things would ever agree to stop using them.

As a rule of thumb, international agreements never require states to do anything that would be to their strategic disadvantage. If they did then no state would ever agree to them in the first place.

Indeed, even the Geneva Conventions generally say things like "if your opponent makes use of this for their advantage, it loses protection under these conventions in that instance". They really wanted to discourage people trying to gain a strategic advantage by breaking the rules and hoping their opponent was too moral to then ignore said rules.