Early yesterday morning a drone hit a naval base in the city of Eilat, located at Israel’s southern tip. It appears to have been fired by one of the many Iran-backed militias in Iraq, which have been integrated into Iraq’s military and political structure. Yesterday, Israel also struck a building next door to the Iranian embassy in Damascus, killing two generals in the Iranian Revolutionary Guard.

Benny Avni observes that the strike on Damascus is a sign that Israel “is changing the rules of the game, with a direct hit to the Iranian head of the snake.” Avni also notes that one of the strike’s targets was likely involved in planning the drone attack on Eilat, which itself is the first of its kind. Now the question is how America will respond:

Congressional Republicans are calling on President Biden to disinvite Iraq’s prime minister, Mohammed Shia al-Sudani, and scrap his scheduled April 15 Washington visit. . . . Following quiet negotiations between Washington and Tehran officials, Iran-backed Iraqi militias all but stopped attacks on American troops based in Iraq and Syria. The Iraqi militias are part of the country’s security apparatus, and Baghdad must be held responsible.

Apparently, whatever deal was made between the White House and Iraq didn’t rule out attacks on Israel. It should.

As this newsletter noted last week, Gaza is not suffering from famine, and the efforts to suggest that it is—which have been going on since at least the beginning of last year—are based on deliberate manipulation of the data. Nor, as Shany Mor explains, does international law require Israel to feed its enemies:

Article 23 of the Fourth Geneva Convention does oblige High Contracting Parties to allow for the free passage of medical and religious supplies along with “essential foodstuff, clothing, and tonics intended for children under fifteen” for the civilians of another High Contracting Party, as long as there is no serious reason for fearing that “the consignments may be diverted from their destination,” or “that a definite advantage may accrue to the military efforts or economy of the enemy” by the provision.

The Hamas regime in Gaza is, of course, not a High Contracting Party, and, more importantly, Israel has reason to fear both that aid provisions are diverted by Hamas and that a direct advantage is accrued to it by such diversions. Not only does Hamas take provisions for its own forces, but its authorities sell provisions donated by foreign bodies and use the money to finance its war. It’s notable that the first reports of Hamas’s financial difficulties emerged only in the past few weeks, once provisions were blocked.

Yet, since the war began, even European states considered friendly to Israel have repeatedly demanded that Israel “allow unhindered passage of humanitarian aid” and refrain from seizing territory or imposing “demographic change”—which means, in practice, that Gazan civilians can’t seek refuge abroad. These principles don’t merely constitute a separate system of international law that applies only to Israel, but prolong the suffering of the people they are ostensibly meant to protect:

By insisting that Hamas can’t lose any territory in the war it launched, the international community has invented a norm that never before existed and removed one of the few levers Israel has to pressure it to end the war and release the hostages.

These commitments have . . . made the plight of the hostages much worse and much longer. They made the war much longer than necessary and much deadlier for both sides. And they locked a large civilian population in a war zone where the de-facto governing authority was not only indifferent to civilian losses on its own side, but actually had much to gain by it.