Feature
7 September 2026
1. When Just War Theory Runs Out of Road
Israel’s 2023-25 war[1] in Gaza has produced staggering civilian harm,[2] particularly because of its population density and urban confinement, and an onslaught of competing legal and moral judgments. UN agencies, states, and NGOs have accused both Hamas and Israel of grave breaches of international humanitarian law (IHL), including war crimes and even genocide, while Israel insists it is engaged in a tragic but just defensive war against a genocidal terrorist organisation. Does this claim hold water, or should it be considered another paradigmatic example of just war failure against “terrorism” like the Iraq war?[3]
Just war theory (JWT) remains an indispensable moral grammar for evaluating war, but it is diagnostic rather than generative: it tells us when wars go wrong, yet offers little guidance for what states should do instead of war when facing non-state terrorist actors embedded within civilian populations. The Gaza war exposes this limitation acutely. The question, therefore, is not whether Israel had any right to defend itself, but whether a strategically serious, non-violent security paradigm could have provided a morally superior and potentially more effective alternative to large-scale military invasion.
2. Why Gaza Pushes Christian Ethics Beyond Classical JWT
Classical JWT was developed primarily for wars between states. Hamas, however, is a non-state armed actor operating through terrorism, systematically violating non-combatant immunity while embedding itself within civilian society. This asymmetry strains JWT in three ways:
(I) Discrimination collapses in dense urban warfare: Even when civilian harm is unintended, the scale of destruction in Gaza belies over 90%[4] of housing damaged or destroyed, which cannot plausibly be dismissed as “unintended side-effects” in any morally meaningful sense; rather, they represent structural disregard for Palestinian civilian life.[5]
(II) Proportionality and aims erodes over time: Wars become morally defective when leaders pursue aims beyond defence and peace, such as revenge, regime change for its own sake, or ethno-territorial re-engineering, even if they had initially invoked a just cause.[6] Are Israel’s war aims limited to neutralising Hamas’ capacity for such attacks and securing a stable peace, or have they expanded into more open-ended punitive or aggressive goals? The longer the campaign continues with civilian harm and unclear political end-state, the harder it becomes to maintain that Israel’s intentions remain proportionate and peace-oriented.[7]
(III) Reasonable chance of success becomes illusory: Given Hamas’ ideological resilience, underground networks, and regional backing, many analysts doubt whether such maximalist goals meet Dubik’s standard of a “reasonable prospect of success” without rendering Gaza effectively uninhabitable and fuelling cycles of radicalisation that undermine any reasonable hope of long-term peace.[8]
3. From Just War Ethics to Just Peace-Making (Non-Violent Tradition)
The non-violent tradition within Christian ethics does not reject the legitimacy of defence outright. Rather, it reorders the moral sequence: lethal force must genuinely be the last resort, not merely an emotional last. Theologian-ethicists such as Lisa Sowle Cahill, Glen Stassen, and Ronald Sider argue that Christian ethics must expand beyond the war/peace binary toward just peace-making, a framework that prioritises law, institution-building, civilian protection, and coercive but non-lethal means.
The Gaza war demonstrates that Israel’s response moved almost immediately to maximal military force, bypassing an entire spectrum of morally available, strategically plausible alternatives. The proposal advanced here is not pacifism, but non-violent coercion: the deliberate use of pressure, constraint, and protection without mass killing.
4. An Alternative: Re-envisioning the Nonviolent Approach In Gaza
4.1 Reframing Hamas
Cahill and Stassen argue that Christian ethics must move beyond an exclusive focus on war/peace at the interstate level and learn to think in terms of just peacebuilding and policing rather than war. Instead of treating every grave attack as a casus belli, states should increasingly respond to violence as a criminal phenomenon to be constrained through law enforcement, international cooperation, and non-lethal coercion.[9] In the case of Hamas, this would mean seeing it less as a rival sovereign with whom one fights a “war,” and more as a transnational, armed criminal network responsible for atrocities, crimes and subject to prosecution and de-legitimisation.
This reframing fits Gene Sharp’s insight that political power rests on a web of consent and cooperation.[10] Hamas depends not only on weapons, but also on flows of money, sanctuary, social services, and a minimum of acquiescence among Palestinians and external sponsors. Strategically, we need to ask how Israel and the international community can withdraw that consent and support in non-lethal ways? Atack and Vinthagen both emphasise that nonviolent action is not limited to protest, but includes coercive non-cooperation[11] and institution-building that gradually shifts the balance of power without mass killing.[12] Admittedly, this leans more towards a method of prevention, rather than a cure for the attacks on 7 October, but then again we need to ask ourselves, why the need for the cure to be an eye for an eye? Or could the initial Hamas attacks not be a catalyst for such preventative actions to begin, better late than never?
4.2 Nonviolent (Non-lethal) Security Measures
A justified first layer of response to Hamas’ threat is defensive and preventive, not offensive and punitive. I would suggest four clusters of non-lethal measures:
- Civil defence and early warning. Strengthening border fortifications, early-warning systems, rapid evacuation protocols, and protected shelters along the Gaza perimeter are all non-lethal ways of reducing Hamas’ capacity to inflict casualties in any future attack.[13] From a Christian ethics standpoint, this is a paradigmatic case of protecting the innocent with “defence through shielding” without harming the aggressor.[14]
- Intelligence, arrests, and targeted incapacitation. Treating Hamas as a criminal organisation suggests a response focused on intelligence penetration, arrest, trial, and long-term incapacitation of key operatives rather than broad, lethal “decapitation” strikes.[15] Non-lethal special operations (designed to capture rather than kill), cyber-disruption of command structures, and intensive cooperation with regional and international law-enforcement bodies fall under this heading.[16] Such measures are morally closer to policing than to war; they can still involve risk and sometimes lethal force in extremis, but the default aim is to neutralise and prosecute, not destroy.
- Legal-judicial strategies. Instead of unilaterally bombing Gaza, Israel could have used 7 October as a catalyst to push much more aggressively for the capture and international criminal prosecution of Hamas leaders, providing evidence to the ICC, supporting universal-jurisdiction prosecutions in third states, and inviting international monitoring of Israeli conduct at the same time. Cahill argues that Christians should prefer law over war and strengthen international institutions capable of addressing atrocities without large-scale violence.[17] The pursuit of Hamas as criminals before an international tribunal does not replace immediate defence, but it shifts the long-term struggle from the battlefield to the courtroom and the realm of justice and legitimacy.
- Unarmed civilian protection (UCP) near flashpoints. Wallace’s work on UCP shows that trained, non-armed teams, local and international, can deter certain forms of violence simply by their presence and real-time documentation.[18] While UCP could not have stopped Hamas’ 7 October attacks itself, deploying such teams in and around high-tension areas (including border communities and key checkpoints) could have provided an additional non-lethal layer of deterrence and early warning, and might have helped reduce everyday abuses that fuel radicalisation.
4.3 Nonviolent Coercion: Cutting Off Hamas’ Pillars of Support
Sharp famously describes nonviolent action as the withdrawal of cooperation from oppressive structures.[19] In Hamas’ case, its power rests on at least four pillars: external funding and arms, local governance and service provision, symbolic status as “resistance” and the weakness of political alternatives, namely a strong Palestinian authority and government that denounces it.[20] A nonviolent strategy would seek to erode each pillar through coercive means:
- Targeted economic and diplomatic sanctions on Hamas, not Gaza as a whole. Instead of broad blockade and siege policies that predictably produce humanitarian catastrophe and collective punishment, Israel, together with regional and global actors, could design targeted financial sanctions, asset freezes, and travel bans focusing on Hamas’ leadership, business networks, and arms-supply channels.[21]
- Strengthening non-Hamas Palestinian institutions. Darweish and Rigby show that nonviolent Palestinian movements have periodically gained traction when they embodied credible, disciplined alternatives to armed struggle.[22] A nonviolent strategy for Israel would involve deliberately strengthening Palestinian civil-society actors and governance structures that reject terror, even if they criticise Israel sharply. This involves easing movement, economic activity, and political space[23] in ways that allow nonviolent actors to compete successfully with Hamas’ narrative of “only armed resistance works”.[24] For Christian ethics, this is a form of enemy-love at the political level.
- Information, narrative, and “political jiu-jitsu.” Atack adopts Sharp’s notion of political jiu-jitsu and how it highlights how nonviolent movements can convert an oppressor’s brutality into moral and political losses for the oppressor.[25] In the current IH context, this logic has mostly operated against Israel where images of bombed apartment blocks and dead children have massively damaged Israel’s legitimacy and just cause; ironically framing Israel as the oppressor. A different strategy would consciously seek to deprive Hamas of such propagandist victories and refusing tactics that generate mass civilian casualties, inviting independent observers, and publicly submitting Israeli actions to international scrutiny. Nonviolence here is not passivity nor pacifism; it is a deliberate refusal to hand the enemy the moral high ground.[26]
5. Just Peace-making and the Long Game
Long term peace in Gaza involves layered, institutionalised nonviolent coercion, defensive measures, legal strategies, targeted sanctions, UCP, and support for nonviolent Palestinian actors as the first line of response to terror, with any recourse to lethal force treated as strictly last resort, limited, and accountable. Such an approach does not guarantee security, but neither does the war that we see raging now. Indeed, the Gaza campaign may well have increased long-term insecurity by entrenching hatred and trauma within the region, or at least renewing it. Seen in this light, theologically-informed nonviolence is not moralism but a recognition that killing our way to peace is both ethically corrosive and strategically self-defeating.[27]
That said, nonviolent coercion is certainly not a panacea. In the Gazan reality, its effectiveness is constrained by political fragmentation, entrenched ideologies, nationalism and the lack of robust third-party and international leverage. Admittedly this alternative’s weakness lies in that it does not incorporate the reality of Israel’s government’s wider and ulterior political agenda, which cannot be confirmed nor denied either way. But it does provide a theoretical foundation upon which further discussions and even action can be built upon. For Christian ethics today, the task is not to abandon just war but to relativise it and to treat it as a limiting framework within a broader vocation of just peace-making and nonviolent action. In the case of Israel and Gaza, this means affirming the legitimacy of genuine defence, condemning egregious violations by all parties, and even calling the church to creative, coercive engagement in nonviolent practices that anticipate the shalom of the Kingdom of God.
[1] Or Gaza war or Israel-Hamas war, as used interchangeably in this paper.
[2] Top 3 highest civilian death rates (normalised to first 2 years) per year based on a comparison of all state and non-state international wars in the past 25 years:
- Syria (first 2 years) ~20,000-25,000 per year
- Israel-Gaza (2023–25) ~14,000-16,000 per year
- Iraq (first 2 years) ~12,000-15,000 per year
[3] Andrew G. Fiala, ed., The Just War Myth: The Moral Illusions of War (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2010), 152.
[4] United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), UNRWA Situation Report 156: Situation in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, Including East Jerusalem, accessed November 12, 2025, https://www.unrwa.org/resources/reports/unrwa-situation-report-156-situation-gaza-strip-and-west-bank-including-east-jerusalem.
[5] World Bank, “New Report Assesses Damages, Losses, and Needs in Gaza and the West Bank,” accessed November 12, 2025, https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2025/02/18/new-report-assesses-damages-losses-and-needs-in-gaza-and-the-west-bank.
[6] Richard Brian Miller, ed., War in the Twentieth Century: Sources in Theological Ethics, Library of Theological Ethics (Louisville, Ky: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1992), 206.
[7] Nigel Biggar, All Things Considered: Making Moral Sense of the Wars in Ukraine and Gaza, Occasional Paper 201 (Sydney: Centre for Independent Studies, June 2024), 17.
[8] Roland Chia, “Collateral Damage or Moral Breakdown? Ethical Reflections on the Israel–Hamas War,” Ethos Institute for Public Christianity, accessed November 14, 2025, https://ethosinstitute.sg/collateral-damage-or-moral-breakdown/.
[9] Duane L. Cady, From Warism to Pacifism: A Moral Continuum, 2. ed (Philadelphia, Pa: Temple University Press, 2010), 121–22.
[10] Gene Sharp, The Power and Struggle, The Politics of Nonviolent Action, Vol. 1 (Sargent (Porter), U.S., 1973), 8.
[11] Iain Atack, Nonviolence in Political Theory (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2022), 115.
[12] Stellan Vinthagen, A Theory of Nonviolent Action: How Civil Resistance Works (London: Zed Books, 2015), 203–4.
[13] M. S. Wallace, Security Without Weapons: Rethinking Violence, Nonviolent Action, and Civilian Protection (London: Routledge, 2017), 140.
[14] Wallace, Security Without Weapons, 311–12.
[15] Darrell Cole, Just War and the Ethics of Espionage (New York: Routledge, 2015), 43.
[16] Todd Burkhardt, Just War and Human Rights: Fighting With Right Intention (Albany: SUNY Press, 2017), 23.
[17] Lisa Sowle Cahill, Blessed Are the Peacemakers: Pacifism, Just War, and Peacebuilding, 1st ed (Minneapolis, Minnesota: Augsburg Fortress Publishers, 2019), 25.
[18] Wallace, Security Without Weapons, 18–19.
[19] Sharp, Power and Struggle, 13.
[20] Atack, Nonviolence in Political Theory, 110.
[21] Burkhardt, Fighting With Right Intention, 103–4.
[22] Marwān Darweish and Andrew Rigby, Popular Protest in Palestine: The Uncertain Future of Unarmed Resistance (London: Pluto Press, 2015), 9.
[23] Darweish and Rigby, Popular Protest in Palestine, 135.
[24] Darweish and Rigby, Popular Protest in Palestine, 55.
[25] Atack, Nonviolence in Political Theory, 123.
[26] Sharp, Power and Struggle, 65.
[27] Fiala, The Just War Myth, 190.
Kyle found Jesus when he was 14 in an Anglican Church having been invited by a classmate from ACS(I), and subsequently grew up in Barker Road Methodist Church. Moving from a law degree to giving up his dream job of being a teacher, he has recently finished his studies at Trinity Theological College and is currently pastoring at Bukit Panjang Methodist Church.