Professor Yuval Shany is the Hersch Lauterpacht Chair in International Law and former Dean of the Law Faculty of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He also currently serves as Vice President for Research at the Israel Democracy Institute, and as a member of the UN Human Rights Committee. Prof. Shany received his LL.B. cum laude from the Hebrew University, LL.M. from New York University and Ph.D. in international law from the University of London.
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Israel is confronting a national scandal over the hospitalization of an alleged terrorist detained by the Israel Security Agency (ISA). On Aug. 23, three Israeli civilians were hiking near a West Bank water spring when a hidden explosive was detonated by remote control. Seventeen-year-old Rina Shnerb was killed instantly, and her father and brother were injured.
On April 6, three days before the Israeli elections, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was interviewed on Israeli TV Channel 12. When asked about his policy regarding the West Bank (Judea and Samaria) he replied:
In recent weeks, the Israeli Supreme Court, sitting as a High Court of Justice (HCJ) for administrative matters, handed down three decisions regarding house demolitions. The first one—Naji v. IDF Commander of the West Bank, issued on Dec.
Since 2014, the IDF has been conducting investigations into incidents that took place in Gaza during Operation Protective Edge (July-August 2014) and raised concerns about Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) compliance with Israeli law and international law of armed conflict. In the course of the investigation, the office of the Military Advocate General (MAG)—Israel’s chief military legal officer—has reviewed some 360 incidents, referring 24 of them for criminal investigation. These have led so far to the conviction of three soldiers for the crime of looting.
An Israeli district court issued a lengthy decision last month related to the Duma arson attack, the July 31, 2015, fire-bombing of two Palestinian houses by two young Jewish settlers that burned alive an 18-month-old, fatally injured the baby’s parents, and badly wounded the family’s 4-year-old.
On Thursday, the Supreme Court of Israel dismissed a petition against the rules of engagement governing use of force by the Israeli security forces in the violent clashes in Gaza (HCJ 3003/18 Yesh Din v. IDF Chief of General Staff). The clashes began on March 30, 2018, around mass Palestinian protests held in various points along the fence separating the Gaza Strip from Israel.
In July 2014, a deadly series of events began when Hamas operatives kidnapped and murdered three Israeli teenagers in the West Bank. After waves of arrests of Hamas leaders by Israeli security agencies in response and Hamas’s subsequent launching of 40 rockets from Gaza into Israel, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) began Operation Protective Edge: an air campaign that soon expanded into a limited ground invasion of Gaza primarily aimed at locating and destroying cross-border “terror tunnels”designed by Hamas.