Legal reasoning is only as good as the ethical concepts it uses. That’s why the International Criminal Court’s decision to issue arrest warrants for Israel’s Prime Minister and former defence minister is basically flawed.

The ICC claims reasonable grounds for believing Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant guilty of the war crimes of ‘intentionally and knowingly depriv[ing] the civilian population in Gaza of objects indispensable to their survival’, creating ‘conditions of life calculated to bring about [their] destruction’.