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The Geneva Conventions and Occupation: Which Rules Apply, and Which Are Broken

The rules are not ambiguous. Written in the aftermath of the Nazi occupation of Europe, the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949 was designed precisely to protect civilian populations living under the boot of a foreign military power. Its drafters had seen what occupation looked like when it operated without legal constraint. They wrote the rules in plain language, and they made them binding.

More than seven decades later, those rules apply — in the West Bank, in Gaza, and in East Jerusalem. The International Committee of the Red Cross, the authoritative guardian of international humanitarian law, confirmed as much in its 2004 commentaries and has reiterated the point consistently since. So has the International Court of Justice, most recently in its July 2024 advisory opinion, which found that Israel’s prolonged presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory constitutes an unlawful occupation and that a range of Israeli practices breach the Convention directly.

What follows is not a legal brief. It is an account of what the law actually says, what the ICRC says it means, and what has happened on the ground.

Article 33: The Absolute Ban on Collective Punishment

Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention is unequivocal: “No protected person may be punished for an offence he or she has not personally committed. Collective penalties and likewise all measures of intimidation or of terrorism are prohibited.” The ICRC Commentary describes this prohibition as one of the Convention’s “fundamental guarantees,” admitting no derogation.

The application of this rule to Israeli military practice in the occupied territories has been documented exhaustively. Israel’s demolition of family homes — the residences of relatives of people accused or convicted of attacks — is among the most cited examples. The policy has been challenged repeatedly before the Israeli Supreme Court, which has permitted it to continue under a rationale of “deterrence.” Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and B’Tselem have all documented hundreds of such demolitions carried out since 2000, with a sharp acceleration following October 2023. B’Tselem recorded 108 punitive demolitions in the West Bank between October 2023 and early 2025 alone.

Gaza presents the starkest case. Following the Hamas attacks of 7 October 2023, Israel imposed a total siege — cutting off electricity, water, food, and fuel — before its ground offensive began. Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant announced on 9 October 2023: “We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly.” He explicitly described a “complete siege.” UN Secretary-General António Guterres, OCHA, and multiple UN Special Rapporteurs described the siege as constituting collective punishment in violation of Article 33. OCHA’s situation reports from October and November 2023 documented the near-total collapse of water and electricity systems serving the entire civilian population of Gaza’s 2.3 million residents.

Article 49: No Transfers — In Either Direction

Article 49 contains two distinct prohibitions that are routinely conflated. The sixth paragraph — the one most often cited in relation to Israeli settlements — states: “The Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.” But the first paragraph is equally important: “Individual or mass forcible transfers, as well as deportations of protected persons from occupied territory to the territory of the Occupying Power or to that of any other country, are prohibited, regardless of their motive.”

On settlements: the ICRC Commentary states plainly that Article 49(6) “is intended to prevent a practice adopted during the Second World War by certain Powers, which transferred portions of their own population to occupied territory for political and racial reasons or in order, as they claimed, to colonize those territories.” The parallel to Israel’s settlement enterprise is the conclusion drawn by the ICJ in its 2004 advisory opinion on the Wall, reiterated in 2024, and by the UN Security Council in Resolution 2334 (2016), which declared Israeli settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem a “flagrant violation” of international humanitarian law. According to Peace Now’s Settlement Watch data, the settler population in the West Bank (excluding East Jerusalem) has grown from roughly 110,000 in 1993 to more than 500,000 today, housed across more than 140 officially recognized settlements and over 100 outposts.

On forcible transfer out: the displacement of Palestinians — during military operations, through home demolitions, through the revocation of residency rights in Jerusalem — falls under this paragraph. HaMoked and Ir Amim have documented the revocation of permanent residency from thousands of Palestinians in East Jerusalem since 1967, a practice the ICRC regards as a form of forcible transfer. OCHA estimates that more than 1.9 million people — nearly the entire population of Gaza — were displaced from their homes between October 2023 and early 2025.

Articles 47 to 78: The Occupier’s Obligations

The section of the Fourth Geneva Convention running from Article 47 to Article 78 sets out the comprehensive obligations of any occupying power toward the civilian population under its control. The framework is built on a core principle articulated in Article 47: the rights of protected persons “may in no way be renounced” — neither by the occupying power, nor by any agreement with a collaborating authority, nor by annexation.

Article 55 obligates the occupying power to ensure food and medical supplies for the population “to the fullest extent of the means available to it.” Article 56 requires it to maintain medical and hospital establishments. Article 59 obliges it to agree to relief schemes if the territory is “inadequately supplied.” These provisions have direct bearing on Gaza, where the World Health Organization documented the collapse of the health system under bombardment and siege: by mid-2024, fewer than half of Gaza’s hospitals were partially functional, according to WHO situation reports.

Article 78 permits the occupying power to subject protected persons to assigned residence or internment — but only as an individual security measure, subject to appeal, and subject to review. It does not authorize administrative detention without charge or trial as a routine instrument of population control. Yet Israel’s administrative detention system — which holds detainees for renewable six-month periods on the basis of secret evidence, without charge or trial — has been in continuous operation since 1967. HaMoked and B’Tselem have documented the practice in detail. At peak points following October 2023, the number of Palestinians held under administrative detention exceeded 3,500, according to Israeli Prison Service data cited by HaMoked.

The Question of Applicability — and Why Israel’s Position Has Not Prevailed

Israel has long maintained that the Fourth Geneva Convention does not formally apply to the West Bank and Gaza on the grounds that these territories were not “the territory of a High Contracting Party” prior to 1967 — i.e., they were not sovereign Jordanian or Egyptian territory in the relevant legal sense. This position has been rejected by every significant international legal body that has examined it, including the ICJ in 2004 and 2024, the UN Security Council in Resolution 2334, and the ICRC itself.

The ICRC’s position, stated clearly in its updated Commentary, is that the de facto control exercised by Israel over these territories is sufficient to trigger application of the Convention. Scholar Noura Erakat, in her 2019 study Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine, traces the legal history of this argument and its repeated rejection at the international level in detail. The legal consensus outside Israel is not contested: the Convention applies, the obligations are binding, and the record of compliance is, by any documented measure, severely deficient.

Law Without Enforcement

The Fourth Geneva Convention does not enforce itself. The High Contracting Parties — the 196 states that have ratified it — bear collective responsibility under Common Article 1 to “ensure respect” for the Convention. That obligation, the ICJ noted in its 2024 opinion, is not merely aspirational. It creates a positive duty to act.

What that duty requires in practice — sanctions, arms embargoes, referrals to international courts — is a political question that states have so far answered, in the main, with rhetoric. But the legal framework itself is clear. The rules governing occupation were written by people who had watched civilians suffer under occupations that recognized no rules at all. They knew what they were writing, and why. The text remains.

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