Even wars have rules. They don't stop soldiers killing each other but they're intended to make sure that civilians caught up in the fighting are treated humanely and protected from as much danger as possible. The rules apply equally to all sides.
If one side has suffered a brutal surprise attack that killed hundreds of civilians, as Israel did on 7 October 2023, it does not get an exemption from the law. The protection of civilians is a legal requirement in a battle plan.
That, at least, is the theory behind the Geneva Conventions. The latest version, the fourth, was formulated and adopted after World War Two to stop such slaughter and cruelty to civilians from ever happening again.
At the headquarters of the International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva (ICRC) the words "Even Wars Have Rules" are emblazoned in huge letters on a glass rotunda.
The reminder is timely because the rules are being broken.
Getting information from Gaza is difficult. It is a lethal warzone. At least 181 journalists and media workers have been killed since the war started, almost all Palestinians in Gaza, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. Israel won't let international news teams into Gaza.
Since the best way to check controversial and difficult stories is first hand, that means the fog of war, always hard to penetrate, is as thick as I have ever experienced in a lifetime of war reporting.
It is clear that Israel wants it to be that way. A few days into the war I was part of a convoy of journalists escorted by the army into the border communities that Hamas had attacked, while rescue workers were recovering the bodies of Israelis from smoking ruins of their homes, and Israeli paratroopers were still clearing buildings with bursts of gunfire.
Israel wanted us to see what Hamas had done. The conclusion has to be that it does not want foreign reporters to see what it is doing in Gaza.
To find an alternative route through that fog, we decided to approach it through the prism of laws that are supposed to regulate warfare and protect civilians. I went to the ICRC headquarters as it is the custodian of the Geneva Conventions.
I have also spoken to distinguished lawyers; to humanitarians with years of experience of working within the law to bring aid to Gaza and other warzones; and to senior Western diplomats about their governments' growing impatience with Israel and nervousness that they might be seen as complicit in future criminal investigations if they do not speak up about the catastrophe inside Gaza.
In Europe there is also now a widely held belief, as in Israel, that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is prolonging the war not to safeguard Israelis, but to preserve the ultra-nationalist coalition that keeps him in power.
As prime minister he can prevent a national inquiry into his role in security failures that gave Hamas its opportunity before 7 October and slow down his long-running trial on serious corruption charges that could land him in jail.
Netanyahu rarely gives interviews or news conferences. He prefers direct statements filmed and posted on social media. Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa'ar declined a request for an interview.
Boaz Bismuth, a parliamentarian from Netanyahu's Likud party, repeated his leader's positions: that there is no famine in Gaza, that Israel respects the laws of war and that unwarranted criticism of its conduct by countries including the UK, France and Canada incites antisemitic attacks on Jews, including murder.
Lawyers I have spoken to believe that there is evidence that Israel followed war crimes, committed by Hamas when it attacked Israel, with very many of its own, including the crime of genocide.
It is clear that Israel has hard questions to answer that will not go away.
It also faces a legal process alleging genocide at the International Court of Justice and has a prime minister with limited travel options as he faces a warrant for arrest on war crimes charges issued by the International Criminal Court (ICC).
Rival politicians inside Israel accuse Netanyahu of presiding over war crimes and turning Israel into a pariah state.
He has pushed back hard, comparing himself – when the warrant was issued – to Alfred Dreyfus, the Jewish officer wrongly convicted of treason in an antisemitic scandal that rocked France in the 1890s.
Evidence in the numbers
The evidence of what is happening in Gaza starts with the numbers. On 7 October 2023 Hamas broke into Israel, killing 1,200 people. More than 800 were Israeli civilians. The others were members of Israel's security forces, first responders and foreign workers. Around 250 people, including non-Israelis, were dragged back into Gaza as hostages.
Figures vary slightly, but it is believed that 54 hostages remain in Gaza, of whom 31 are believed to be dead.
Collating the huge total of Palestinian casualties inside Gaza is much more difficult. Israel restricts movement inside Gaza and much of the north of the strip cannot be reached.
The latest figures from the ministry of health in Gaza record that Israel killed at least 54,607 Palestinians and wounded 125,341 between the 7 October attacks and 4 June this year. Its figures do not separate civilians from members of Hamas and other armed groups.
According to Unicef, by January this year 14,500 Palestinian children in Gaza had been killed by Israel; 17,000 are separated from their parents or orphaned; and Gaza has the highest percentage of child amputees in the world.
Israel and the US have tried to spread doubt about the casualty reports from the ministry, because like the rest of the fragments of governance left in Gaza, it is controlled by Hamas. But the ministry's figures are used by the UN, foreign diplomats and even, according to reports in Israel, the country's own intelligence services.
When the work of the ministry's statisticians was checked after previous wars, it tallied with other estimates.
A study in medical journal The Lancet argues that the ministry underestimates the numbers killed by Israel, in part because its figures are incomplete. Thousands are buried under rubble of destroyed buildings and thousands more will die slowly of illnesses that would have been curable had they had access to medical care.
Gaza's civilians had some respite during a ceasefire earlier this year. But when negotiations on a longer-term deal failed, Israel went back to war on 18 March with a series of huge air strikes and since then a new military offensive, which the prime minister says will finally deliver the elusive "total victory" over Hamas that he promised on 7 October 2023.
Israel has put severe restrictions on food and aid shipments into Gaza throughout the war and blocked them entirely from March to May this year. With Gaza on the brink of famine, it is clear that Israel has violated laws that say civilians should be protected, not starved.
A British government minister told the BBC that Israel was using hunger "as a weapon of war". The Israeli Defence Minister, Israel Katz, said openly that the food blockade was a "main pressure lever" against Hamas to release the hostages and accept defeat.
Weaponising food is a war crime.
A failure of humanity
War is always savage. I was in Geneva to see Mirjana Spoljaric, the Swiss diplomat who is president of the ICRC. She believes it can get even worse; that there is no doubt that both parties are flouting the Geneva Conventions, and this sends a message that the rules of war can be ignored in conflicts across the world.
After we walked past glass cases displaying the ICRC's three Nobel peace prizes and handwritten copperplate reproductions of the Geneva Conventions, she warned that "we are hollowing out the very rules that protect the fundamental rights of every human being".
- Gaza now worse than hell on earth, humanitarian chief tells BBC
We sat down to talk in a room with one of Europe's most serene views: the tranquillity of Lake Geneva and the magnificent sprawl of the Mont-Blanc massif.
But for Ms Spoljaric, constantly aware of the ICRC's role as custodian of the Geneva Conventions, the view beyond the Alps and across the Mediterranean to Gaza is alarming. She has been in Gaza twice since 7 October and says that it is worse than hell on earth.
"Humanity is failing in Gaza," Ms Spoljaric told me. "It is failing. We cannot continue to watch what is happening. It's surpassing any acceptable, legal, moral, and humane standard. The level of destruction, the level of suffering."
More importantly, she says, the world is watching an entire people, the Palestinians, being stripped of their human dignity.
"It should really shock our collective conscience… It will haunt us. We are seeing things happening that will make the world an unhappier place far beyond the region."
I asked her about Israel's justification that it is acting in self-defence to destroy a terrorist organisation that attacked and killed its people on 7 October.
"It is no justification for a disrespect or for a hollowing out of the Geneva Conventions," she said. "Neither party is allowed to break the rules, no matter what, and this is important because, look, the same rules apply to every human being under the Geneva Convention.
"A child in Gaza has exactly the same protections under the Geneva Conventions as a child in Israel."
Mirjana Spoljaric spoke quietly, with intense moral clarity. The ICRC considers itself a neutral organisation; in wars it tries to work even-handedly with all sides.
She was not neutral about the rights all human beings should enjoy, and is deeply concerned that those rights are being damaged by the disregard of the rules of war in Gaza.
'We will turn them into rubble'
On the evening of 7 October 2023, while Israel's troops were still fighting to drive Hamas invaders out of its border communities, Benjamin Netanyahu delivered a brief video address to the Israeli people and the watching world.
Speaking from Israel's military command centre in the heart of Tel Aviv, he chose words that would reassure Israelis and induce dread in their enemies. They were also a window into his thinking about the way that the war should be fought, and how Israel would defend its military choices against criticism.
The fate of Hamas was sealed, he promised. "We will destroy them and we will forcefully avenge this dark day that they have forced on the State of Israel and its citizens.
"All of the places which Hamas is deployed, hiding and operating in, that wicked city, we will turn them into rubble."
Netanyahu praised allies who were rallying around Israel, singling out the US, France and the UK for their "unreserved support". He had spoken to them, he said, "to ensure freedom of action".
But in war freedom of action has legal limits. States can fight, but it must be proportionate to the threat that they face, and civilian lives must be protected.
"You're never entitled to break the law," says Janina Dill, professor of global security at Oxford University's Blavatnik School.
"How Israel conducts this war is an entirely separate legal analysis… The same, by the way, is true in terms of resistance to occupation. October 7 was not an appropriate exercise [by Hamas] of the right of resistance to occupation either.
"So, you can have the overall right of self-defence or resistance. And then how you exercise that right is subject to separate rules. And having a really good cause in war legally doesn't give you additional licence to use additional violence.
"The rules on how wars are conducted are the rules for everybody regardless of why they are in the war."
What a difference time and death make in war. Twenty months after Netanyahu's speech, Israel has exhausted a deep reservoir of goodwill and support among many of its friends in Europe and Canada.
Israel always had its critics and enemies. The difference now is that some countries and individuals who consider themselves friends and allies no longer support the way Israel has been fighting the war. In particular, the restrictions on food aid that respected international assessments say have brought Gaza to the brink of famine, as well as a growing stack of evidence of war crimes against Palestinian civilians.
"I'm shaken to my core," Jan Egeland, the veteran head of the Norwegian Refugee Council and former UN humanitarian chief, told me. "I haven't seen a population like this being so trapped for such a long period of time in such a small, besieged area. Indiscriminate bombardment, denied journalism, denied healthcare.
"It is only comparable to the besieged areas of Syria during the Assad regime, which led to a uniform Western condemnation and massive sanctions. In this case, very little has happened."
