What International Law Says About Israel’s Invasion of Lebanon • Explaining the issues of sovereignty, self-defense and humanitarian safeguards.

“Legality is very much in the eye of the beholder,” said Hugh Lovatt, an expert on international law and armed conflict at the European Council on Foreign Relations. “Does Israel’s right to self-defense trump Lebanon’s right to sovereignty? We can go around and around this circle.”

“You have a right to self-defense, but you have to exercise this self-defense in a certain way,” said Judge Kai Ambos, a law professor at the University of Göttingen in Germany, who serves on a special tribunal at The Hague that prosecutes war crimes committed in Kosovo during the 1990s. “It’s not limitless.”

Interpretation would have to be settled by a court or the United Nations Security Council. But it is rare for courts or the Security Council to address these types of questions.

What does international law say?

Article 2(4) of the United Nations Charter%20of%20the,political%20independence%20of%20other%20States.) “prohibits the threat or use of force and calls on all members to respect the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of other states.” But Article 51 of the charter also makes clear that member states have a right to defend themselves from armed attacks.

There are more complications. Lebanon is a sovereign state, but Israel says it is fighting against Hezbollah, which is both a militant group and an influential player in Lebanon’s government. (Israel and the United States consider it a terrorist organization.)

Some experts say the invasion is legal because Lebanon allows Hezbollah to use its territory to strike Israel.

Humanitarian legal protections

Separate from questions about the legality of Israel’s invasion, every country has a legal obligation to safeguard civilians during warfare.

Even if Hezbollah places military targets in civilian buildings, for example, experts say Israel must consider the safety of the noncombatants inside when it conducts airstrikes. (International law does not distinguish between ground invasions and airstrikes — the measure is “use of force,” according to Oona A. Hathaway, a professor of international law at Yale University.)

The United Nations says more than 1,500 people have been killed in Lebanon by the Israeli military in the past two weeks, including hundreds of deaths in a single day in September, during one of the most intense air raids in recent warfare.

“While it is difficult to make definitive legal assessments of individual attacks from far away,” said Janina Dill, the co-director of the Oxford Institute for Ethics, Law and Armed Conflict, in an email, “the use of heavy explosives in densely populated areas of Lebanon and attacks against residential buildings where Hezbollah militants are suspected to hide, which have caused hundreds of casualties, many of them women and children civilians, raise very serious concerns about compliance with these rules.”

Nearly one million people have been forced to flee their homes in Lebanon, a humanitarian crisis that many fear will soon rival the one in Gaza.

Humanitarian laws of war, including the Geneva Conventions, require military forces to give civilians ample warning to flee before attacking. Israel has issued evacuation alerts for large sections of south Lebanon, though, in some cases, it has given people as little as two hours to leave their homes before striking.

Israel is also required to consider whether displaced people can be relocated safely. For example, the United Nations says more than 250,000 people have fled from Lebanon to Syria, which is still ravaged from a civil war that began in 2011.

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