Litigating Slow Violence: Deprivation in Gaza, Humanitarian Aid, and the Limits of International Humanitarian Law

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Luster, Tamar
• 署名单位: Tel Aviv University
• 刊物名称: HARVARD INTERNATIONAL LAW JOURNAL
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0017-8063; 2153-2494
• 发表日期: 2026
• 页码: 433-512
• 关键词: SUBSISTENCE HARMS; starvation; RIGHTS; time

摘要

In March 2025, Israel's Supreme Court upheld the legality of Israel's restrictions on humanitarian aid into Gaza, rejecting a petition brought by Israeli non-governmental organizations. The ruling came amidst intensifying international debate over whether Israel's conduct amounts to genocide and the issuance of international arrest warrants against top Israeli leaders for the war crime of starvation. This Article critically examines the Supreme Court decision to demonstrate how norms of international humanitarian law (IHL), ostensibly designed to counter deprivation, can be invoked by belligerents to entrench and obscure it. Focusing on the parties' competing interpretations of two central IHL obligations-to allow and facilitate humanitarian aid, and to prohibit civilian starvation as a method of warfare-the analysis exposes deep tensions within IHL and its underlying assumptions. IHL's vague language of allow and facilitate humanitarian aid under technical arrangements enables belligerents to cast restrictive measures in managerial and neutral terms, and in turn, reframe deprivation as legal compliance. Beyond identifying the indeterminate and facilitative features of international legal norms, the Article highlights an underexplored mechanism through which these features are operationalized: the deployment of temporality. In the context of prolonged deprivation, time is not a neutral fact but a driving force shaping the meaning of belligerents' conduct, the substance of relevant legal obligations, and the lived experience of civilians exposed to deprivation. Further, the legal proceedings themselves-through delays, inaction, and selective timelines-could inherently constrain efforts to recognize and address the slow violence of deprivation.