Hamas, Smartphones and the Crisis of Humanitarian Law

Veni, vidi… and understood!?

There is something about modern wars that keeps bothering me.

We constantly hear people talk about civilians and combatants as if the distinction were still as clear as it was fifty or a hundred years ago. As if we still lived in a world where a soldier wore a uniform, belonged to an identifiable army, and fought on a relatively defined battlefield.

But it only takes a look at today’s conflicts to realize that reality has changed.

Hamas fighters dressed as civilians.

Tunnels beneath entire neighborhoods.

Weapons caches hidden in populated areas.

Citizens sending information through their smartphones.

Apps designed to report enemy movements.

Drones operated by people who have never formally belonged to an army.

And then a question emerges. It sounds simple, but it is becoming increasingly difficult to answer:

Who is actually participating in the war?

For years Israel has argued that Hamas deliberately turned parts of the civilian population into part of its operational environment. I am not interested here in debating the political aspect of that claim. What interests me is something else.

What happens to legal categories when reality no longer fits inside them?

The Geneva Conventions were built on a basic premise: there are combatants and there are civilians.

The former may be attacked.

The latter must be protected.

But what happens when a combatant becomes indistinguishable from a civilian?

And what happens when a civilian begins performing functions that were once exclusively military?

The issue becomes even more uncomfortable when we look at the other side of the phenomenon.

It is not only organizations such as Hamas that blur the line.

States do it as well.

When governments encourage citizens to report enemy movements, detect drones, identify infiltrators, or provide information useful to military operations, something changes.

I am not saying that such behavior is illegitimate.

If my own country were under attack, I would probably want to help too.

What I am saying is that, from a legal perspective, things begin to look much less clear.

Because we are no longer talking about someone who merely observes.

We are talking about someone who participates.

Perhaps not with a rifle.

Perhaps not in uniform.

But participates nonetheless.

And the more I think about it, the more I wonder whether we are facing a problem for which international law still has no satisfactory answer.

Because the central question no longer seems to be who pulls the trigger.

The real question is who becomes part of the war effort.

That is where everything starts to become complicated.

For decades, we debated whether civilians should remain outside war.

Today we may need to ask whether that is still possible.

Because if Hamas turns civilians into involuntary shields and states turn citizens into permanent sources of military intelligence, we may be witnessing something deeper than a technological evolution.

We may be watching one of the fundamental concepts of modern humanitarian law begin to erode: the very idea of the civilian.

And if that idea disappears, the consequences are enormous.

Because a war in which nobody knows exactly who is fighting and who is not is a war in which legal protections become increasingly fragile.

Perhaps the greatest challenge of the twenty-first century is not the drone.

Not artificial intelligence.

Not even hypersonic missiles.

Perhaps it is something much more basic.

Finding an answer once again to a question that used to seem obvious:

Who is still truly a civilian in a war where everyone can participate?