In the summer of 2019, two FBI agents showed up at Roya Hakakian’s door to inform her that she was likely the target of a plot by the Islamic Republic’s operatives in the U.S. Like Masih Alinejad, whom the ayatollahs’ thugs had recently been planning to kidnap from her Brooklyn home, Hakakian is an Iranian-born American citizen who writes frequently of the clerical regime’s abuses. Hakakian was initially skeptical, but knew all to well that Tehran has few qualms about punishing its critics abroad:

From its inception, the ayatollahs’ regime murdered whomever it considered to be its enemy, often gaining access through a target’s own confidants. In 1991, the former prime minister, Shapour Bakhtiar, who had fled Iran days before the triumph of the Islamic revolution and whose son—a police intelligence officer in France—kept him under tight security, was stabbed to death in his own home in Paris by an assassin who had had the help of Bakhtiar’s most trusted assistant. Since then, the regime has only grown bolder and bloodier.

Back in 1993, Iran’s former ambassador to the United Nations, Mansour Farhang, wrote an op-ed for the New York Times titled “Iran Wants to Assassinate Me. Why?” Then, too, it was the FBI that had informed him of a regime plot: they had discovered his name on a hit list of some 500 individuals Iran planned to liquidate. . . . Ultimately, he concluded that the regime simply wished to prove that it had the power to destroy its critics, no matter how far they had tried to put themselves out of reach.

International borders are no obstacle to Iran’s henchmen. Hundreds of opponents have been murdered on foreign soil since 1979, starting in Bethesda, Maryland, in 1980. . . Most of these dissidents died in near-obscurity, their political murders barely publicized at all. . . . The European Union, especially, turned a blind eye, perhaps because a handful of dead refugees were not worth jeopardizing international trade relations.

The rise to power of the Taliban in Afghanistan once again is expected to bolster other terrorist groups in the region. In retrospect, the spying, assassination, and terrorism operations that Iran carried out in the West for the first fifteen years after the establishment of the Islamic Republic may have similarly inspired other militant groups that were to launch their assaults on the continent in the 2000s.

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.