The moral and legal norm obliging warring parties to protect medical units during armed conflict is in deep crisis, and systematic attacks against healthcare facilities have become much more pervasive over the years generating immense harm to civilian populations.
Neve Gordon’s research investigates the reasons leading to corrosion of this norm in international law, focusing on the legal and epidemiological dimensions and developing creative solutions that seek to elevate the protection of medical units during armed conflict.
This project, in collaboration with Nicola Perugini of the University of Edinburgh begins with a history of human shields, before developing a socio-legal analysis of the history of hospital bombings which led to Gordon and Perugini calling for a legal ban on attacking hospitals, arguing that only a non-derogable prohibition on attacking hospitals will help elevate the norm obliging warring parties to protect medical units during armed conflict.
The project has analysed how Israel was justifying its attacks on hospitals in Gaza, and coined the term medical lawfare to describe a strategy adopted by the Israeli military and government, leading to what they called medicide.
About the academic
Neve Gordon is a professor of human rights law at Queen Mary University of London and the Vice President of the British Society for Middle East Studies. Gordon has been a member at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, and a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, Brown University, the University of Michigan, and SOAS, and is currently a board member of the International State Crime Initiative. He writes regularly for the popular press and his articles have appeared in The Guardian, The Los Angles Times, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, Al Jazeera, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The London Review of Books.