Within the early hours of Wednesday morning on 31 July 2024, it was confirmed that Hamas political chief, Ismail Haniyeh, who had traveled to Tehran for the inauguration ceremony of Iran’s new president, was killed in Iran’s capital on account of a strike in his place of short-term residence. The specifics of this strike will not be precisely clear. On the time of writing, completely different experiences level to conflicting situations concerning how this operation was carried out (see e.g. right here and right here). Each Iran and Hamas have blamed Israel for this assault.
Focusing on Haniyeh in Tehran provokes a plethora of subtle questions concerning territoriality in armed conflicts. Such questions are compounded when making an allowance for that strikes in Tehran appear to face on the intersection of two conflicts, specifically, the Israel-Hamas battle and the Iran-Israel battle. To state the apparent, characterizing the character of those conflicts is essential for any inquiry targeted on the imperatives of Worldwide Humanitarian Legislation (IHL) in such extraterritorial operations. Of the 2 conflicts in query, the Israel-Iran battle undoubtedly possesses a global character, whereas the characterization of the battle between Israel and Hamas has confirmed to be someway much less simple (see e.g. right here and right here). There’s scholarly literature that leans in the direction of categorizing the battle in Gaza as a non-international armed battle (NIAC) (see right here) and this publish will proceed on this assumption. Nonetheless, it needs to be famous that there’s additionally literature that implies that the battle is blended (worldwide and non-international) with the Prosecutor of the ICC taking this view in his request for arrest warrants concerning the battle (right here, right here and, right here). To the extent that the concentrating on of the Hamas chief is seen as arising within the context of a NIAC in Gaza, the query surfaces as as to if the principles of IHL warrant concentrating on him in a territory that’s each distant and international to the areas the place precise conduct of hostilities is in progress. On this publish, an try shall be made to make clear the IHL framework governing the extraterritorial concentrating on of Hamas chief in Tehran.