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The white flag rules go all the way back to the Hague Conventions, which are quite a bit earlier than the Geneva Conventions: So technically a white flag is an offer of parley rather than surrender per se, but that is a very narrow distinction. That said, it is an established rule that a...

Exactly. Perfidy or illegal combatant status is punished *afterwards*, not by refusing to accept surrender. To slightly draw back to the previous bit of the debate, what makes a situation such as this a ROE violation and *not* a war crime is that the various Conventions on war do specifically...

That is incorrect. A combatant power is required to accept surrenders from unlawful combatants; they're simply allowed to put them on trial afterwards and have them imprisoned or executed on the basis of that trial.

Yes. Under the Conventions, the proper way to handle surrendering Hamas insurgents is to accept their surrender, then have a military court find that they are not legal combatants and have them lawfully imprisoned and/or executed. The Conventions are very specific about this -- you're required...

Technically yes, but during the Nuremberg trials, it was held that because international treaties such as the Hague Convention had been accepted "by all civilised nations" for a considerable period of time, they had become part of the universal and customary laws of war and thus were binding on...

I would point out that Israel is prosecuting this as a rules of engagement violation, not a Geneva Convention war crime. Which is exactly in line with my argument -- an individual snap judgement shooting might not necessarily be a war crime, but a military whose rules of engagement permitted or...

The Geneva Conventions rules aren't quite that simple -- it's a war crime to *knowingly* fire on surrendering troops. This is not a strict liability offense, so it would not necessarily apply to situations where persons were fired upon as a snap decision and it was not recognized that they were...