Daily Current Affairs

Israel, Hamas, and the laws of war (GS Paper 2, International Relation)

Why in news?

• On October 7, Hamas, a Palestine-based terrorist group, launched an attack on Israel, killing hundreds of civilians and taking many hostage.
• Israel has retaliated with all its might, triggering a war in West Asia.

 

What are the laws of war?

• There are two separate and independent international law questions related to wars.

1. First, under what conditions or when can countries use force in their international relations? This is known as jus ad bellum, regulated by the United Nations (UN) Charter.
2. Second, how is a war to be fought, that is, what military actions are permissible? This is known as jus in bello.

• Assuming a country is justified under the UN Charter to use force, it still must ensure that it satisfies jus in bello obligations. Justification to use force does not relieve a country of its obligations to use such force in accordance with international law.
• The ‘how’ of using force or the law of war is known as International Humanitarian Law (IHL), which provides the rules that must be followed during an armed conflict.
• IHL is contained in customary international law, the Geneva Conventions of 1949 and the Additional Protocols of 1977.
• It regulates the conduct of the parties or groups engaged in an armed conflict. Its primary objective is to protect civilians and reduce the suffering a war unleashes. No matter how just the cause of fighting a war, warring parties must comply with IHL.

 

Do the laws of war apply to the ongoing military conflict?

• Yes, because the military conflict between Israel and Hamas is an armed conflict.
• As was held by the International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia in the Prosecutor versus Dusko Tadić case, an armed conflict in international law exists when “there is a resort to armed force between States or protracted armed violence between governmental authorities and organised armed groups or between such groups within a State”.
• International law classifies armed conflicts into two categories; international armed conflict (IAC) and non-international armed conflict (NIAC).
• According to Common Article 2 of the Geneva Conventions, IAC includes all cases of declared war or any other armed conflict between two or more countries.
• NIAC includes non-governmental forces (Hamas) involved in battle with governmental forces (Israel). Common Article 3 of the Geneva Convention applies to NIAC. Thus, Israel and Hamas are obliged to abide by IHL.

 

What about civilian killings?

• The primary objective of IHL is that during an armed conflict, a distinction is always made between combatants and civilians.
• War parties can only attack combatants and military targets, not civilians and civilian objects. Indiscriminate attacks that fail to distinguish between combatants and civilians are forbidden and thus illegal.
• Accordingly, the killing of civilians by Hamas is illegal. Israel’s illegal and belligerent occupation of the Palestinian territory since 1967 does not allow Hamas to kill, injure, abduct, or torture Israeli civilians or target civilian installations.
• Also, any military attack that causes disproportionate harm to civilians, when judged against the expected military benefit, is barred. Israel reportedly dropped 6,000 bombs on Gaza, causing widespread destruction and death. This is a disproportionate use of force.
• Hamas’s horrific attack on Israel does not justify Israel inflicting disproportionate harm on the civilian population in Gaza. All this amounts to grave breaches of the 1949 Geneva Conventions and constitutes as war crimes.

 

Is hostage-taking legal?

• Hamas has taken Israelis hostage. This is illegal.
• Hostage-taking is specifically recognised as a war crime by Article 8 of the Rome Statute,  a treaty establishing the International Criminal Court.
• Article 1 of the International Convention Against the Taking of Hostages recognises hostage-taking as a crime.

 

What about the Gaza Strip blockade?

• Israel’s plan to block the supplies of food, electricity, water, and fuel in the Gaza Strip, where close to two million people live, amounts to collective punishment; retaliating against a group for the conduct of individual/s said to belong to that group. This action will exacerbate the already harsh air and sea blockade of the Gaza Strip since 2007.
• Such an action violates a fundamental tenet of IHL that no person should be punished for actions they didn’t commit. Punishing all Gaza Strip residents for Hamas’s actions is illegal and a war crime.
• Additionally, under IHL, warring parties must give advance warning to civilians to evacuate before attacking, which should be effective. If civilians are not given adequate time to evacuate, the warning will be ineffective. Israel’s warning to the residents of the Gaza Strip is not effective.
• Given the air and sea blockade, the civilians do not have a realistic possibility of moving to safe places. In any case, civilians who do not move out despite the warning must also be protected.
• Both sides need to respect their IHL obligations and an investigation should be launched into the war crimes committed.

 

The UN approved Kenya-led security mission to Haiti

(GS Paper 2, International Organisation)

Why in news?

• Recently, the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) has approved international intervention in the form of a foreign security mission, led by Kenya, to restore security, protect critical infrastructure and control spiralling violence in the country.
• Haiti has experienced a surge in violence over the past year as armed groups took control of large parts of the country, including the capital Port-au-Prince.
• This has resulted in the killings of nearly 2,800 people, including 80 minors, between October 2022 and June 2023.

Why is UN sending a mission to Haiti?

• Haitian Prime Minister Ariel Henry first sought international support to assist the national police in October 2022 after the country plunged into a crisis when a group of gangs called “G9 and Family” seized control of the entry of the main fuel port Varreux in the capital protesting the PM’s decision to cut fuel subsidies.
• The blockade brought the country to a standstill and led to massive shortages. The lack of gas and diesel adversely affected transportation and forced several hospitals and other medical institutions that relied on fuel-powered generators to halt operations.
• A UNICEF report at the time claimed that the operations of three-quarters of the country’s major hospitals were hit due to the blockade. To make matters worse, there was a shortage of bottled water in the backdrop of a new outbreak of cholera.
• The stalemate ended in July 2023 after Kenya proposed to head the multinational force, following which the resolution was forwarded to the UNSC.

 

Key Highlights of the resolution:

• Unlike the UN peacekeeping mission to Haiti that ended in 2017, the multi-national security mission (MSS) will not be operated by the UN. Kenya has volunteered to lead the force. Other countries like the Bahamas, Jamaica and Antigua and Barbuda have also offered support.
• The resolution says that the force will provide “operational support” to the Haitian National Police, including building its capacity to counter gangs, improve security conditions in the country and secure ports, airports and critical intersections.
• The resolution adds that the forces will have the authority to make arrests in coordination with Haitian police. It also intends to create favourable conditions in the country to pave the way for elections.
• Polls have not taken place in Haiti since 2016. The strength of the force in Haiti has not been specified in the resolution, although discussions suggest that 2,000 personnel would be part of the mission.
• While the U.S. has made it clear that it won’t send its troops, it has pledged $100 million in logistical support like intelligence, communications, airlift operations and medical aid.

 

What led to the delay?

• Haiti’s troubled past with foreign military interventions is being viewed as the primary reason for the delay in deployment. The last time a force was sent to stabilise Haiti was in 2004 when former Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide was overthrown in a rebellion.
• This was followed by a UN peacekeeping mission which went on from 2004 to 2017. The mission was marred by allegations during its deployment in the country. 
• A sewage runoff from a peacekeeper camp was blamed for causing a cholera epidemic which saw more than 10,000 deaths.
• There were also serious allegations of sexual abuse against the UN peacekeepers. Since then, Haitians have been sceptical about the intervention of a foreign armed force.
• Moreover, countries were wary of lending support to PM Henry who doesn’t enjoy the popular support of Haitians.

 

New quantum engine does work by flipping the identity of atoms

(GS Paper 3, Science and Technology)

Why in news?

• Physicists in Germany have come up with a way to convert the energy difference between two quantum states of a group of atoms into work.
• The device adapts the principles of the familiar classical engine to the subatomic realm, giving physicists a way to study the nascent field of quantum thermodynamics in more detail as well as, possibly, build better quantum computers.

 

Pauli’s principle:

• All subatomic particles can be classified as either fermions or bosons. Fermions are the building blocks of matter; bosons are particles that carry the forces acting between them.
• Now, when a bunch of particles are cooled to very nearly absolute zero, so that their quantum nature comes to the fore, they would all like to have the lowest energy possible – but they can’t. This is known as Pauli’s exclusion principle.
• All particles in a system are distinguished by four quantum numbers. The values of the four numbers together tell something about how much energy a particle has.
• The exclusion principle states that, in a given system, no two particles can have the same four quantum numbers, that is, they can’t occupy the same energy level. Fermions are particles that are bound by this rule. So they recursively occupy the lowest one available, until all possible energy levels are filled.
• Bosons are not bound by the exclusion principle principle: they can all occupy the same lowest energy level at a given low temperature. This is why, for example, superconductivity is possible.

 

Fermionic energy:

• So a system of fermions will have more energy at a low temperature than a system of bosons. For this to be the basis of an engine, physicists needed a simple way to convert some particles from being bosons to being fermions.
• A solution arrived in the early 2000s, when researchers found via multiple studies that if a collection of fermions were cooled almost to absolute zero and then prodded to interact with each other using a magnetic field, they could be made to behave like bosons.
• In the new study, researchers with institutes in Germany, Japan, and Argentina did just this with a gas of lithium-6 atoms.
• They cooled them to just millionths of a degree above absolute zero, and confined them in a trap of oscillating electric and magnetic fields.

 

Fermions to bosons and back:

• Classical engines convert heat into work. For example, the internal combustion engine in a car uses the heat released by the combustion of petrol or diesel to push a piston.
• Overall the engine has four steps: the fuel is compressed, ignition causes the fuel-air mix to expand and push the piston out, the mix cools and stops expanding, and the piston is brought back to the first step.
• The quantum engine, or a ‘Pauli engine’, has a similar set of four steps.

1. First, the atoms collected in the trap are compressed and kept in a bosonic state.
2. Second, the strength of a magnetic field applied on the atoms is increased by a small amount. Interactions between the atoms and the field cause the former to slip into a fermionic state: they are forced to move out of the lowest energy level and progressively occupy higher levels.
3. Third, the compression applied in the first step is eased.
4. Fourth: the magnetic field strength is reduced to its original value.

• The energy of the atoms increases during the third step and this can be converted to work. The efficiency of the quantum engine is based on how much more energy is released in the third step relative to the energy added to the system in the first step.
• Currently, the quantum engine is 25% efficient. The researchers expect to be able to increase this to 50% or more in future.

 

Way Forward:

• There is a branch of physics called quantum thermodynamics, in which scientists study how thermodynamics ‘emerges’ in quantum-physical systems.
• The quantum engine is still a proof of concept. The researchers have demonstrated that their design can be used to force a bunch of atoms to cyclically release energy as they are switched between bosonic and fermionic states.
• The researchers need to figure out how this energy can be moved from inside the trap to a system on the outside.