A decision five years ago transformed homelessness policy. Now the justices could overrule it.
In 2018, a federal court issued a consequential decision about homelessness in America: People without housing can’t be punished for sleeping or camping outside on public property if there are no adequate shelter alternatives available.
The Ninth Circuit’s decision, Martin v. Boise, said that punishing homeless people with no other place to go would violate the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment. Ever since, cities and states have struggled to comply with it, crafting convoluted policies like a new camping ban in Portland, Oregon that prohibits homeless camping during the hours of 8 am to 8 pm.
As municipal backlash to Martin grew, so has the nation’s homelessness crisis, especially in the nine Western states under the Ninth Circuit’s jurisdiction, where some 42 percent of the country’s homeless population now lives.
The Supreme Court declined to hear Martin in 2019. But they now could reconsider the decision. A petition was filed in late August concerning a similar case in Grants Pass, Oregon, a city of 38,000 people. In 2022, the Ninth Circuit decided it would be unconstitutional for Grants Pass to fine homeless people sleeping on public property if there was nowhere else for them to go. The city is challenging that decision.
The Supreme Court hasn’t indicated whether it will hear this significant case, a step it will likely take at the end of this year or early next. Supporters of the Martin decision say there’s no reason the high court should take up the request, as there’s no clear disagreement among circuit courts to resolve. In the half-decade since Martin came down, there have been dozens of cases affirming it, including in the Fourth Circuit in Virginia, and federal lower courts in Ohio, Missouri, Florida, Texas, New York, and Hawaii.
But a bipartisan coalition of cities and states is pressuring the Supreme Court to intervene. In the last month, dozens of local governments have filed briefs pleading with the court to reconsider Martin, including liberal cities like Los Angeles, Honolulu, and Seattle.
Some in the court system have also signaled they’d like to see the case overruled. This summer, when the full Ninth Circuit declined to review the Grants Pass v. Johnson decision issued by a three-judge panel in 2022, 16 judges dissented, arguing both cases were incorrectly decided. “Martin handcuffed local jurisdictions as they tried to respond to the homelessness crisis; Grants Pass now places them in a straitjacket,” one dissent read. A state judge in Arizona also recently urged the Supreme Court to take up the matter, arguing Martin and Grants Pass both “tie the hands of cities that seek in good faith to address the growing homeless encampment epidemic.”
California’s Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom also filed a brief in August urging the Supreme Court to reconsider the cases. While Newsom insisted he is not objecting to the “narrow” Martin decision that people experiencing homelessness should not be criminalized for sleeping outside when they have nowhere else to go, the governor argued cities need more clarity on implementation, and that lower courts have interpreted Martin too broadly.
Despite Newsom saying that he’s not seeking to overturn Martin wholesale, homeless advocates say this is naive at best, since that’s what the lawyers representing Grant Pass are asking to do.
“Newsom and the other briefs that aren’t asking for a full overturn of Martin — just clarity around some of these restrictions — are fooling themselves, perhaps willfully so, and are being willfully ignorant of the consequences of their involvement,” Eric Tars, the legal director for the National Homelessness Law Center, told Vox. “The petitioners in this case are asking for a full overturn, that’s the question they have presented to the Court and that’s what they’ll be arguing for.”
Theane Evangelis, a Gibson Dunn attorney and lead counsel for the city of Grants Pass, told Vox they do believe Martin and Grants Pass are “legally wrong” and “are hopeful the Supreme Court will grant review and undo these harmful decisions.”
The Grants Pass v. Johnson case is about whether it violates the Eighth Amendment to fine or arrest unhoused people
Five years ago, about six weeks after the Martin decision was decided, three homeless individuals filed a federal class-action lawsuit against Grants Pass, Oregon arguing that the city’s laws and customs — like its anti-camping ordinance — punished them for their status of being involuntarily homeless.
The lead plaintiff was Debra Blake, who had been experiencing homelessness for about a decade and was continually wracking up hundreds of dollars in fines and fees for sleeping outside and allegedly trespassing. By 2020 Blake owed over $5,000 in penalties for living outside. In their lawsuit, attorneys representing the plaintiffs noted the dearth of affordable housing and homeless shelters in the city, and blasted Grants Pass’s arguments that unhoused people could simply leave and go elsewhere. Blake died a year later at 62, and so the case was renamed for another homeless plaintiff, Gloria Johnson.
In 2022, a three-judge panel from the Ninth Circuit ruled in favor of the homeless plaintiffs.
Opponents of the decision argued Grants Pass marked a radical expansion of Martin, since the Oregon city had issued civil penalties to unhoused people, not criminal ones. Some also alleged that Grants Pass created even further confusion for local governments, since the Ninth Circuit held that a Christian homeless shelter that had strict rules like mandatory church attendance could not be counted as available shelter in Grants Pass due to potential violations of the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause. Many cities have only religious shelters or rely heavily on them.
Supporters of the Grants Pass ruling say it neither expanded Martin nor created confusion. “I see it as a clarification of Martin,” said Tars, of the National Homelessness Law Center, saying that Grants Pass clarifies “that you have to look at the collective impact of all these different ordinances — including anti-sleeping bans or rules barring being in parks after dark — that can make it illegal to exist basically anywhere in public even if they have no other place to do so.”
Ed Johnson, the director of litigation at the Oregon Law Center and the lead attorney representing the homeless plaintiffs in Grant Pass, told Vox that the decision is being greatly mischaracterized by opponents. “The opinion is exceedingly narrow and puts no limits whatsoever on a city’s ability to prevent permanent or even established encampments,” he said.
So is it a violation of the Eighth Amendment to issue tickets and fines against people experiencing homelessness?
Lawyers representing Grant Pass say no, emphasizing that enforcing local regulations should not be considered cruel and unusual punishments.
“I think the entire idea that it could constitute cruel and unusual punishment to arrest someone for sleeping on the street is incorrect,” added Timothy Sandefur, the vice president for legal affairs at the Goldwater Institute, a conservative legal advocacy group that filed a brief urging the Supreme Court to take the case. Sandefur told Vox that “it’s true” that arresting someone for a status like being homeless is wrong, but he argued it would be at most a violation of due process, not of the Eighth Amendment.
Homeless advocates in support of Martin and Grants Pass say ticketing, fining, and arresting unhoused people if they have nowhere else to go is indeed a violation of the Eighth Amendment. In a brief filed to the Ninth Circuit in support of the unhoused plaintiffs, lawyers with the Fines and Fees Justice Center argued that civil penalties frequently trap unhoused people in cycles of poverty and homelessness, ensnaring them in debt that prevents them from securing housing at all.
And given the insufficient number of shelter beds, the practical outcome of rules barring rest under a blanket on any publicly owned property or rest in a car overnight in a public park parking lot “effectively function[s] as a city-wide prohibition of homelessness” that “punish[es] their very existence.”
Overturning Martin and Grants Pass could have implications for forced treatment
As public frustration with tent encampments has grown, a movement urging a “get tough” approach has emerged, arguing that the costs of allowing tent cities to proliferate are too steep and that waiting for cities to build enough new housing before acting is unacceptable. Some argue that public officials have grown complacent with the homelessness crisis, and rely on Martin as an excuse to maintain the status quo.
In efforts to both crack down on encampments but comply with the Ninth Circuit decisions, some cities and states have pushed more punitive legislation, like bills to make camping a felony, or criminalize sleeping outdoors on public property except within designated areas. The question of whether these laws are constitutional under Martin remains an open question. Leaders recognize they probably can’t ban camping everywhere given the court rulings, but they’ve been looking to see if they can ban it in most places instead. If Martin was overturned by the Supreme Court, however, officials would likely feel much more empowered to resume city-wide anti-camping bans and prosecuting those who violate them.
Tars, of the National Homelessness Law Center, said the major difference between now and five years ago is the emergence of a “concrete, well-funded movement” to criminalize homelessness, rather than a patchwork of local regulations decided by individual cities and towns. “Today there are groups actively working together, producing media, going on Fox News, to proactively push criminalization,” he told Vox. “That didn’t exist prior to Martin v. Boise.”
In a Supreme Court brief filed by the California State Sheriffs’ Association and the California Police Chiefs Association, the groups wrote “they, by no means, argue for the criminalization of the homeless” and are committed to “improving the outcomes” for unhoused people. Still, they said the “disastrous” decisions “impermissibly intrude” on their policing duties, and make it “all but impossible” to curb dangers associated with encampments.
If Martin and Grants Pass are overturned, it will not only have implications for clearing tents, but likely also for sending homeless people to substance use or psychiatric treatment programs.
In several of the briefs submitted by local governments, cities reported examples of homeless people “refusing help,” and as Vox has previously reported, the question of what to do with those who turn down offers of shelter has gotten entangled with broader, ongoing debates about involuntary treatment. As pressure to clear encampments mounts, many homeless advocates fear that new laws mandating treatment will be indiscriminately applied to those sleeping outside, and even more so if Martin and Grants Pass no longer provide a check on local governments’ behavior.
Some of the briefs filed to the Supreme Court in support of reconsidering Martin have already raised this issue. “Allowing people to live on the streets or in tents in a park is not a compassionate response to the problem,” wrote Sandefur in the Goldwater Institute’s amicus filing. “A compassionate response would consist of providing people with the care they need — including taking them into custody against their will if they are incapable of managing themselves.”
Asked about the connection between encampments and involuntary care, Sandefur told Vox these cases show that cities “are going to have to find a better solution than what they’ve been doing, which is largely ignoring the problem and hoping it goes away.”
We can now be sure: His policy of repressing Palestinians doesn’t make Israelis safe.
In the past 24 hours, two reports out of Israel have pointed to a striking conclusion: that the failure to prevent Hamas’s murderous assault on southern Israel rests in significant part with the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
First, the Washington Post’s Noga Tarnopolsky and Shira Rubin wrote a lengthy dispatch on the many policy failures that allowed Hamas to break through. They find that, in addition to myriad unforgivable intelligence and military mistakes — especially shocking given Israel’s reputation in both fields — there were serious political problems. Distracted by both the fight to seize control over Israel’s judiciary and their effort to deepen Israeli occupation of the West Bank, Netanyahu and his cabinet allowed military readiness to degrade and left outposts on the Gaza border in the south unmanned.
“There was a need for more soldiers, so where did they take them from? From the Gaza border, where they thought it was calm … not surprising that Hamas and Islamic Jihad noticed the low staffing at the border,” Aharon Zeevi Farkash, the former head of the Israel Defense Forces’ military intelligence, said in comments reported by the Post.
Second, a columnist at Israel’s Ha’aretz newspaper unearthed evidence that Netanyahu has intentionally propped up Hamas rule in Gaza — seeing Palestinian extremism as a bulwark against a two-state solution to the conflict.
“Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas,” the prime minister reportedly said at a 2019 meeting of his Likud party. “This is part of our strategy — to isolate the Palestinians in Gaza from the Palestinians in the West Bank.”
These exact comments have not yet been confirmed by other sources. But the Times of Israel’s Tal Schneider wrote on Sunday that Netanyahu’s reported words “are in line with the policy that he implemented,” which did little to challenge and in some ways bolstered Hamas’s control over the Gaza Strip. Moreover, Schneider notes, “the same messaging was repeated by right-wing commentators, who may have received briefings on the matter or talked to Likud higher-ups and understood the message.” Some Netanyahu confidants have said the same thing, as have outside experts.
Put together, these two pieces tell a larger story: that the strategic vision of Netanyahu’s far-right government is a failure.
The notion that Israel can deliver security for its citizens by dividing and conquering Palestinians, crushing them into submission as a kind of colonial overlord, is both immoral and counterproductive on its own terms. Recognizing this reality will be crucial to formulating not only a humane response to Hamas’s atrocity, but an effective one.
The far right’s theory of security failed
In 2017, Israeli far-right parliamentarian Bezalel Smotrich proposed what he termed a “decisive plan” to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Smotrich, who is now serving as finance minister in Netanyahu’s cabinet, argued (correctly) that the root of the conflict was competing claims to the same land from two distinct national groups. But, unlike his centrist peers, Smotrich claimed that these ambitions were incommensurable: that no territorial compromise could ever be reached between Israelis and Palestinians. In such a zero-sum conflict, one side has to win and the other has to lose.
The key to Israel winning such a total victory, he wrote, is simple: Break the Palestinians’ spirit.
“Terrorism derives from hope — a hope to weaken us,” Smotrich argued. “The statement that the Arab yearning for national expression in the Land of Israel cannot be ‘repressed’ is incorrect.”
Doing this, he continued, begins by annexing the West Bank and rapidly expanding Jewish settlements there. Once Israel has declared its intention to never let that land go, and created realities on the ground that make its withdrawal unimaginable, the Palestinians will reconcile themselves to the new reality — accept a second-class form of citizenship, leave voluntarily, or attempt violent resistance and be crushed.
Smotrich has used his time in Netanyahu’s cabinet to try to implement this plan — working both to de facto annex the West Bank and to rapidly expand Jewish settlement. The result has been the exact opposite of what Smotrich thought would happen: Atrocities by emboldened settler extremists ignited Palestinian anger. Atrocities committed by Palestinians led to settler retaliation, creating an unstable situation requiring a significant redeployment of Israel Defense Forces resources to the West Bank — whose raids themselves became a source of Palestinian grievance.
And that, per the Washington Post, is why those troops weren’t on Gaza’s border. Israel’s forces, who should have been defending against terrorists in Gaza, had been dragged to the West Bank as a consequence, at least in part, of the far right’s ideological project.
In fairness to Smotrich, he did admit in his 2017 proposal that his favored policies would likely meet with violent resistance: “In the first stage, it is likely that the Arab terror efforts will only increase.” This, he argued, would represent “a last desperate attempt to actualize their goals.”
Yet the current Hamas attack, and the longer history of Israel-Gaza, does not appear to track such a trajectory. Israel has besieged Gaza for about 16 years, and fought multiple wars with Hamas and other Palestinian militants in the strip. They were not under imminent risk of being stamped out by Israel prior to this attack, nor is there any evidence that Hamas leadership believed this was the final window to try to stop Israel from seizing control of the West Bank. Calling Palestinian terrorism a pure product of “hope” is a simple ideological construction at war with a more complex reality.
A notable thing about Smotrich’s 2017 document is that it contains exactly zero proposals for dealing with Gaza. In his mind, the conflict will be decided in the West Bank — specifically, by Israel’s successful assertion of full control. Gaza is basically an afterthought, discussed only as offhand evidence that the Palestinians can’t be trusted to govern themselves.
This omission was always an obvious problem, one of many in Smotrich’s cruel thinking. But now it points to something more: an indictment of not just Smotrich, but the government he serves in.
Netanyahu’s failure
Israel’s prime minister is not as ideological as Smotrich. Netanyahu’s primary political concerns at present are maintaining power and staying out of jail. He has elevated extremists like Smotrich to the cabinet not purely out of ideological affinity, but because they’re the ones who would back his assault on the independence of the Israeli judiciary.
But at the same time, his approach to the Palestinians has long evidenced the same basic assumption as Smotrich’s “decisive plan”: that they can and must be crushed.
Netanyahu is Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, with three distinct stints in office: 1996-1999, 2009-2021, and 2022-today. During this time, he has been consistently hostile to Palestinian national aspirations — either outright opposing a two-state solution to the conflict or at most paying insincere lip service to it.
It’s not for nothing that Smotrich wrote in his 2017 document that “in democratic terms, there is no daylight between Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and the plan before you.” He assessed, as the prime minister’s actions have borne out, that Netanyahu never had any intention of granting Palestinians true self-determination.
This is why Netanyahu reportedly saw Hamas rule in Gaza as something of an asset. So long as the Palestinians remain divided among themselves — Hamas in charge of Gaza and the moderate Fatah faction in power in the West Bank — then a peace agreement is likely impossible: You can’t come to a negotiated settlement without a unified negotiating partner. The terrorist threat Hamas poses, on this thinking, can be managed; the endless blockade and periodic military operations, euphemistically called “mowing the grass,” can keep the danger posed by Hamas within acceptable parameters.
One of the key differences between Smotrich and Netanyahu is that the former was less subtle. While Smotrich’s plan aimed for a “decisive” defeat of the Palestinians announced through formal West Bank annexation, Netanyahu basically aimed to keep slowly entrenching the status quo of Israeli control forever. He presided over a gradual and incremental pressure campaign, one where Israel incrementally expands its presence in the West Bank while Palestinians are prevented from mounting anything but token resistance.
Netanyahu’s approach grew out of events on the ground. When the peace process pushed by left-wing parties in power in the 1990s failed, giving rise to the terrorist violence of Second Intifada, many ordinary Jewish Israelis concluded that the Palestinians simply couldn’t be negotiated with and moved to the right. The center of political gravity shifted away from long-term solutions to the conflict and toward an approach of simply learning to manage it as best as possible.
This does not mean most Israeli Jews became ideological right-wingers; they are not, polling suggests, fully committed to the project of expanding settlements or West Bank annexation. Mostly, they wanted Netanyahu and the right to keep them safe in a way that the left seemingly couldn’t. The prime minister, in recognition of this reality, campaigned first and foremost on security — earning the moniker, perhaps self-claimed, of “Mr. Security.”
Hamas’s attack on Saturday, a mass slaughter of Israeli civilians without precedent in Israeli history, exposed a basic contradiction in this image in the most agonizing way. Simply put, there is no way now to argue that the right-wing ideological project has delivered the security most Israelis crave.
The more Israel deepens its control over the West Bank, spreading settlements across its lands, the more Palestinians resent them — and the more Israel has to devote its military resources to repressing Palestinians rather than protecting Israel inside its borders.
Nor is there any long-run hope that the Palestinians will simply give up. Hamas’s willingness to engage in brutal violence, sure to be met with an overwhelming response from Israel — one that has reportedly taken the lives of hundreds of people in Gaza so far — indicates that even 16 years of blockade can’t end the incentive for terrorism.
If the failure of the peace process exposed problems in the left’s vision for the conflict, the Hamas attack has exposed the fundamental emptiness of the right’s. The more you hurt ordinary Palestinians, the more you give succor to the extremist visions of monsters like Hamas. The more you draw Israel into the West Bank, the more you entangle Israelis in a system of domination over Palestinians — one that will ultimately deliver nothing but heartbreak for anyone involved.
To be clear: I am not saying Israelis brought these attacks on themselves, that it’s some kind of moral chickens coming home to roost. Nor am I saying that Netanyahu, in place of Hamas, bears moral responsibility for Hamas’s horrifying atrocities against civilians.
What I am saying is that Netanyahu’s policy — visiting harm on the Palestinians in the name of protecting Israelis — is a terrible one. It is both morally indefensible and strategically counterproductive. It is no concession to Hamas, nor legitimation of its violence, to recognize this reality.
After last weekend’s events, it’s exceedingly obvious that trying to crush the Palestinians through settlement and division is not helping anyone. It’s time for a change.
Gaza was already under siege. Now it will get worse.
Israel says it will place Gaza, the occupied territory it has long blockaded, under a “complete siege” after the weekend’s attack by Hamas.
On Saturday, the Palestinian military group launched intensive attacks from Gaza into Israel. Hamas overwhelmed Israeli military installations, killed over 700 people, kidnapped civilians and reportedly soldiers, and dispatched rockets on Israeli civilians. The government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was caught flat-footed despite Israel having the Middle East’s most advanced military and surveillance state.
Now comes the reaction. Israel has called up 300,000 military reservists, and many analysts expect that Israel will send in ground troops. “I ordered a complete siege on Gaza. We are fighting human animals, and we act accordingly,” Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said on Monday. “As of now, no electricity, no food, no fuel for Gaza.”
But Gaza has been described as living under siege for 15 years, as documented by United Nations experts, journalists, and human rights researchers.
Israel and Egypt control the territory’s border crossings, and Israel controls its access to the Mediterranean Sea and its airspace. More than 2 million Palestinian people reside in a narrow strip, only about twice the area of Washington, DC. The humanitarian crisis that Palestinians have endured in Gaza has been severe even before this latest conflict, and now it will get much worse.
The United Nations reports that so far, 413 Palestinian people in Gaza have been killed and 2,300 have been injured, and those numbers will continue to rise. “Hospitals are overcrowded with injured people, there is a shortage of drugs and consumables, and a shortage of fuel for generators,” Ayman Al-Djaroucha, the Médecins Sans Frontières deputy coordinator in Gaza, told Reliefweb.
The scale of violence has already exceeded the most recent severe conflict between Israel and Hamas. Over a two-week period in May 2021, Palestinian militants killed 12 Israeli civilians and one soldier; Israel’s airstrikes killed more than 250 people, at least 129 of them civilians, in Gaza and injured 1,948 people.
The Israel-Palestine conflict has always been asymmetrical: Israel, a nuclear power, has received tens of billions of dollars of US military aid. This weekend, Hamas ruptured Israeli society with wanton violence and mass killing. But it is the Israeli state that retains the capacity to perpetuate an all-out war on the Gaza Strip. Israel has often responded disproportionately to suicide bombings and rocket attacks from Hamas, partially as a deterrent strategy. The result, however, is an intensity of violence in an occupied territory where residents have nowhere to run, where civilians are regularly killed in Israel’s assaults on Hamas targets.
Now, after suffering its most devastating and brutal attack in decades, Israel is starting to respond. Based on Israeli officials’ rhetoric, this will likely also be more devastating for Gaza than anything that has come before.
“Over the next several days, as the Israeli military bombardment of Gaza runs up the civilian death toll, it will say it is striking what it knows to be military targets,” Yousef Munayyer, a researcher with the Arab Center in DC, says. But Hamas’s surprise attacks “exposed just how much Israel doesn’t know about what is going on in Gaza.”
A besieged Gaza
Hamas, a political and militant faction that the US designates as a terrorist organization for its armed resistance to Israel, took over Gaza in 2007. Since then, Israel has instituted a blockade on the territory that has significantly affected the quality of life: There are extreme rates of poverty; over 60 percent of people need food assistance; and access to health care is extremely limited. UN experts have described it as “collective punishment.” About a quarter of Palestinians in Gaza, and nearly 80 percent of youth, are unemployed.
Israel and Egypt have never allowed enough construction materials into the border crossings under their control to enable Gaza’s rebuilding after conflicts. (During the May 2021 conflict, about 58,000 homes were destroyed, and Israel leveled a 12-story high-rise in Gaza that it said contained Hamas assets but also contained the offices of the news agencies Associated Press and Al Jazeera English, and the homes of many families.)
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Ahmad Hasaballah/Getty Images
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Ashraf Amra/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
The political economy of Gaza features something rare and troubling: de-development, which Harvard scholar Sara Roy defines as “the systematic dismantling of a normal economy and its rational functioning.” She has conducted fieldwork there that shows Israel deliberately impedes the betterment of the occupied territory’s living conditions.
“The Gaza Strip is the scene of a humanitarian disaster that has nothing to do with natural causes — it is entirely man-made, a direct result of official Israeli policy,” according to B’tselem, the Israeli human rights group.
Hamas retains some popularity in Gaza, but many Palestinians see the group as corrupt and incapable of addressing the needs of residents. A survey of Palestinians from this summer showed that if legislative elections were held for the first time since 2006, about 44 percent of Gazan voters would choose Hamas. But there has been no opportunity for elections, and so Palestinians living in Gaza must endure an unrepresentative government which imposes some Islamic tenets, implements repressive policies against LGBTQ people, and abusive policies against detainees.
Now, life in Gaza will get worse. The Israeli military has not released additional details about what the “complete siege” will look like, but Netanyahu said Saturday that Israel would turn “all the places that Hamas hides in, operates from … into ruins.”
After barrages of artillery and rocket fire, ground operations to target Hamas fighters may follow.
In the process, the already thrashed Gaza may look like some of the most acute humanitarian crises in war zones from recent memory, like Aleppo amid Syria’s civil war or Mariupol after the Russian assault on Ukraine.
How the world responds could help determine how this plays out
The US fully backs Israel in response to the weekend’s attacks. “In this moment of tragedy, I want to say to them and to the world and to terrorists everywhere that the United States stands with Israel,” President Joe Biden said on Saturday. He added, “This is also a terrible tragedy on a human level. It’s hurting innocent people.”
But many experts are also concerned about how much more suffering could occur, and that goes unmentioned in some of the US’s public statements. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, for example, told CNN, “Our first focus is to make sure that Israel has what it needs to deal with the situation in Gaza.” In an interview with ABC, Blinken warned about the risks of other militant groups and states in the region getting involved, and he told CBS, “And whatever Israel does in Gaza, as always, we look to it to do everything possible to avoid civilian casualities, something, of course, that Hamas doesn’t do.”
Hamas has targeted civilians, in a devastating manner. But human rights defenders and experts on the Middle East worry that, without a clearer call for restraint from US officials, such language can serve as a tacit encouragement of the kind of destructive tactics that Israel has subjected Gaza to several times over.
The fact that no US, EU or other western officials have urged Israel to abide by int’l law or avoid attacking civilians in Gaza or even acknowledging that non-Israeli civilians are in any way at risk is a diplomatic and moral failure of the highest order. https://t.co/9J4yuXvYbs
— Khaled Elgindy (@elgindy_) October 8, 2023