Kazim AlamThree years after Hamas’s cross-border blitz, Israel continues to treat that moment as a watershed that divides Israel’s history into two parts.
Nothing that happened during the decades preceding that day justifies the October 7 blitz, but the events of October 7 justify everything that Israel has done to Palestinians since then.
Nasir Qadri, an international law scholar at Koc University in Istanbul, tells TRT World that October 7 does not give Israel a blank cheque to wreak all kinds of atrocities on a besieged civilian population in the name of self-defence.
That’s because the legal framework that Israel invokes to justify three years of war crimes against Gaza's civilian population was already rejected by the International Court of Justice (ICJ), he says.
In its 2004 advisory opinion on the construction of a separation wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, the ICJ held that Article 51 of the UN Charter does not apply to threats from territory under the invoking state’s own occupation, he says.
Noting that Gaza has been under Israeli military siege since 1967, Qadri says the war following October 7 constitutes the act of an occupying power against the population it occupies.
“The Geneva Conventions place no threshold of prior suffering above which an occupying power’s obligations suspend,” he says.
The observation stems from the fact that a legal order admitting such a threshold would “license atrocity in perpetuity”, with each cycle of violence justifying the next without any end, Qadri notes.
What Israel calls an unprovoked attack on October 7 “occurred within an occupation that the ICJ has found to violate peremptory norms of international law”.
The right of people under unlawful occupation to resist – “including through armed struggle in pursuit of self-determination” – is recognised in Additional Protocol I of 1977 and affirmed in successive UN General Assembly resolutions, he says.
According to Gaza’s health ministry, the Palestinian death toll since October 2023 was nearly 74,000 in late September, with the number of wounded reaching almost 175,000.
Most of the victims of Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza are women and children. Relentless bombing has destroyed 90 percent of civilian infrastructure. The UN estimates that the cost of reconstruction is $70 billion.
Even though a tenuous ceasefire is still in place in Gaza, Israel has not stopped its killing spree. It has killed more than 1,400 Palestinians since October 10, 2025, the day a ceasefire agreement took effect in Gaza.
Qadri insists that the UN Commission of Inquiry, the ICC prosecutor, the ICJ’s provisional measures and Amnesty International’s genocide determination have each found that “Israel’s conduct constitutes war crimes and a plausible risk of genocide”.
The UN commission found Israel responsible for genocide in Gaza and concluded that Israeli authorities committed four of the five acts defined in the 1948 Genocide Convention.
Omer Bartov, professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University in the US, tells TRT World that Israel gave itself – and is still giving itself – a moral blank cheque, or a license to break all international laws and conventions.
“(Israeli leaders) said that, in fact, there were ‘no uninvolved’ people, which implies that there was no collateral damage at all since everyone was (considered) guilty,” he says.
Ali Murat Kursun, assistant professor of international relations at Marmara University in Istanbul, tells TRT World that no single event, regardless of its severity, grants a sovereign the licence to bypass the laws of armed conflict and execute a systematic eradication of a civilian population.
“What we’re witnessing in Gaza is not a proportional security operation, but the most technologically and comprehensively documented genocide in modern history,” he says.
In fact, the political leadership in Tel Aviv “may have cynically leveraged” October 7 to operationalise a “premeditated campaign of demographic engineering”.
“To accept the premise that this attack justifies the atrocities we see today is to permanently dismantle the post-1945 international legal order,” he says.
History didn’t begin on October 7
All three experts reject the notion that October 7 marks the starting point for a legal or moral judgement of the events that unfolded in the last three years.
Qadri says the blockade of Gaza began in 2007, while its occupation has existed since 1967.
“October 7 is an event within a war of liberation waged by an occupied population against an occupying power,” he says.
Using October 7 as the origin of legal judgement excludes six decades of documented violations that constitute the “occupation’s legal character and moral weight”.
Bartov says there are two contexts to October 7.
The first is the six-decade occupation and oppression of Palestinians that has led to their “dehumanisation in the eyes of many Israelis”, and a brutalisation of Israeli society, especially towards Palestinians.
The second context is the Nakba of 1948, a mass displacement that turned Palestinians into an occupied population, he says.
Israelis have both denied the Nakba and treated it as an “incomplete action that should at some point be completed”.
“October 7 appeared to the government and many other Israelis to be the opportunity to ‘finish the job’, first in Gaza and then in the (occupied) West Bank, by way of ethnic cleansing which, as has happened in Gaza, becomes genocidal,” Bartov says.
Any political move forward must begin with recognising the wrongs of the Nakba of 1948 and of the ongoing genocide in Gaza, he adds.
Kursun says that treating October 7 in a historical vacuum is a deliberate analytical fallacy designed to obscure decades of structural violence and asymmetrical state terror.
“The foundational starting point for any rigorous assessment must be 1948,” he says, noting that the year marked the establishment of a state structure reliant on expansion, systemic dispossession of Palestinians, and perpetual demographic containment.
“October 7 was the violent rupture of an unsustainable pressure cooker, paved by decades of illegal annexations, apartheid-like restrictions, and forced expropriations,” he adds.
Western duplicity and genocide
Western capitals affirmed Israel’s right to defend itself after October 7 and chose to look away as Tel Aviv rained down countless bombs and missiles on the densely populated enclave of Gaza.
They woke up to the horrors of Israel’s genocidal war only after it had killed tens of thousands of civilians and turned the besieged territory into rubble.
But even then, many Western capitals criticised the scale of killings and destruction without cutting arms supplies to Tel Aviv.
Qadri says their legal position changed once the ICJ issued binding provisional measures in January 2024, finding a plausible risk of genocide in Gaza.
The gap between Western governments naming genocide from the UNGA podium last month and their arms export records over the preceding three years is not merely a “rhetorical inconsistency”, Qadri says.
“It is the evidentiary foundation of their legal exposure in the accountability proceedings that will follow this war,” he says.
Kursun describes the Western position as a “catastrophic failure of international obligations, good international citizenship, and an exercise in profound geopolitical hypocrisy”.
By supplying the technical and military hardware to Israel, those states transitioned from passive observers to active enablers of a humanitarian collapse, he adds.
“Issuing belated statements of concern, while refusing to diplomatically isolate Israel and render it a global pariah, is a permanent moral stain on the transatlantic alliance,” he says.
