At the UN General Assembly on Tuesday, the Israeli prime minister drew attention to Hizballah’s use of human shields, pointing out three locations where the Iran-backed terrorist group has constructed factories for the production of precision-guided missiles: two beneath multistory apartment buildings and one in an urban residential neighborhood in close proximity to gas installations. Such behavior not only exhibits reckless disregard for human life, but also violates international law. It is also a useful tactic, as Orde Kittrie explains:

U.S., Israeli, and other armed forces have repeatedly been confronted with human shields use by terrorist organizations, including al-Qaeda, Hamas, Hizballah, and Islamic State. Terrorists hide behind human shields (a) to cause Western armed forces to self-impose restraints that render them less effective, and (b) to delegitimize lawful military operations, erode the Western will to fight, and to spur anger at the West by generating civilian casualties for that the terrorists can blame Western militaries. Terrorists engage in the actual war crime of using human shields so that they can falsely accuse U.S., Israeli, and other Western armed forces of engaging in war crimes.

Hizbllah’s use of human shields has been remarkably effective in achieving these objectives. It also puts civilians in danger of explosives accidents, such as those that recently decimated the port of Beirut and detonated a Hizballah arms depot in the Lebanese village of Ain Qana.

Yet Western countries have not yet responded by penalizing, prosecuting, or otherwise holding Hizballah, other terrorist groups, and their leaders and material supporters accountable for using human shields.

While it is commendable that administrators of several universities finally called upon police to crack down on violent and disruptive anti-Israel protests, the actions they have taken may be insufficient. At Columbia, demonstrators reestablished their encampment on the main quad after it had been cleared by the police, and the university seems reluctant to use force again. The school also decided to hold classes remotely until the end of the semester. Such moves, whatever their merits, do nothing to fix the factors that allowed campuses to become hotbeds of pro-Hamas activism in the first place. The editors of National Review examine how things go to this point:

Since the 10/7 massacre, Columbia’s Jewish students have been forced to endure routine calls for their execution. It shouldn’t have taken the slaughter, rape, and brutalization of Israeli Jews to expose chants like “Globalize the intifada” and “Death to the Zionist state” as calls for violence, but the university refused to intervene on behalf of its besieged students. When an Israeli student was beaten with a stick outside Columbia’s library, it occasioned little soul-searching from faculty. Indeed, it served only as the impetus to establish an “Anti-Semitism Task Force,” which subsequently expressed “serious concerns” about the university’s commitment to enforcing its codes of conduct against anti-Semitic violators.

But little was done. Indeed, as late as last month the school served as host to speakers who praised the 10/7 attacks and even “hijacking airplanes” as “important tactics that the Palestinian resistance have engaged in.”

The school’s lackadaisical approach created a permission structure to menace and harass Jewish students, and that’s what happened. . . . Now is the time finally to do something about this kind of harassment and associated acts of trespass and disorder. Yale did the right thing when police cleared out an encampment [on Monday]. But Columbia remains a daily reminder of what happens when freaks and haters are allowed to impose their will on campus.