Following the assassination last week of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, the chief scientist of the Islamic Republic’s nuclear-weapons program, came a predictable chorus of condemnation from European diplomats and American commentators, often ignoring the fact that Fakhrizadeh was not a civilian but a brigadier general in Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, a designated terrorist organization. Richard Kemp explains why criticisms of Fakhrizadeh’s killing—widely thought to have been an Israeli covert operation—are nonsensical. Kemp pays particular attention to the arguments set forth by the former CIA director John O. Brennan:

Brennan says targeted killings are lawful against illegitimate combatants, i.e. terrorist operatives, but not officials of sovereign states in peacetime, with the implication that in this case the perpetrators of the killing were not at war with Iran.

This is to misunderstand the reality that war can no longer be seen as defined periods of hostilities characterized by sweeping movements of armor across the plains, grand naval battles, and dogfights in the skies. Instead, the lines between peace and war have been intentionally blurred by countries such as Iran and Russia, often using surrogates to strike their enemies, as well as by non-state actors such as Islamic State and al-Qaeda, with unprecedented capacity for global violence.

Iran has prosecuted a long-term concerted war against Israel with the declared intention of eliminating the Jewish state. It has funded and directed attacks from Gaza, Lebanon, and Syria, inside Israel and against Israeli citizens and government officials beyond the region. It has built an extensive missile complex in southern Lebanon, deploying many thousands of rockets pointed at Israel. It has sought to develop a base of operations in Syria from which to attack Israel. It has fomented, funded, and armed an insurgency in Yemen from which to conduct a proxy war against Saudi Arabia. It has also launched drone and cruise-missile attacks against Saudi oil facilities.

Those that argue against [current American and Israeli efforts to contain the Islamic Republic] fail to understand the danger that a nuclear-armed Iran presents to the region and the world, wrongly believe that the program can be halted by diplomatic means, or are happy with the idea of a nuclear-armed fanatical dictatorship.

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.