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Good afternoon. So in the next half hour, I'm going to talk about targeted killing from a number of different perspectives.

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But the three important ones are its legality, its morality and its effectiveness.

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The background to the talk is not only that I teach of the idea of school of military law,

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but during the course of my career, the idea of missile defence forces in particular,

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while serving as a legal adviser to the Gaza Strip,

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I was also involved in targeted killing decisions and I will during the course of talk in order to bring this home.

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If you will give you a specific example, obviously with facts fudged as to how the decision making process actually works.

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By way of background, in the mid-nineties, in response to growing Palestinian suicide bombing terrorist attacks,

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the government of Israel was forced to make a decision how to respond to suicide bombers.

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And there were a number of different theories put in place. I have to add one sorry, one disclaimer.

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I don't represent anybody. I don't even represent my own wife.

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And so this is my take on this entire situation.

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But that's it. So there are a number of different theories put out there in terms of how to respond to the suicide bombings in Palestine terrorism.

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And one of the decisions that was made was indeed to implement and articulate, implement targeted killing.

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And during the course of the time, from 94 to 97 that I served as a legal adviser,

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the Gaza Strip was the beginning of this process, which is why I was involved in it.

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So definitions are important in this conversation. One What is targeted killing?

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When I talk about it, we should define target. Killing is a decision made as a final course of action to prevent an imminent terrorist attack.

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And because terms are important, I emphasise this idea of the imminent attack, meaning that the threat posed has to be now, not something amorphous.

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It can't be something like, you know, yours. And by about to Oxford a year from now, that's too amorphous.

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It has to be the sense of imminence. But on the assumption that many, if not all of you are lawyers, we could have a long discussion about imminence.

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And for the first time, for the sake of this talk, an imminent threat is something that's about to occur.

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So one of the important questions is how do you prevent that particular imminent threat?

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And so that is, in essence, the ideology or philosophy behind targeted killing.

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It is, if you will, pre-emptive self-defence or more correctly, aggressive pre-emptive self-defence in many ways in terms of its legal basis.

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It's predicated on Article 51 of the U.N. charter.

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But I need to add, obviously, an aggressive articulation of Article 51 of the UN Charter that there is a long discussion,

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which we don't really have time for in terms of what's the legal paradigm that we're in today.

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The post-9-11 world is as criminal. Is this international law, is this war?

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Is it something in the middle? So the Israeli Supreme Court has defined this as armed conflict short of war.

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We could also have a long conversation about what exactly armed conflict short of war means for the sake of this conversation,

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what it means that it's neither criminal nor is it war between states.

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It's somewhere in the middle. There's no doubt that targeted killing represents manifest, that armed conflict short of war,

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probably more than any other operational counterterrorism measure in terms of its morality.

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So we could have a long discussion about, first of all, what morality in armed conflict means.

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And speaking, frankly, if I would have been invited to this great university 20 years ago, nobody wouldn't talk about morality.

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It was not an inherent part of this force, not this terrorism paradigm.

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So here's what morality means in this incredibly complicated paradigm of targeting.

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It means that you need to define who's a legitimate target.

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And in addition to that, you need to define what is a legitimate target, a legitimate target.

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And the reason you do that from the perspective of morality and ethics is because I pardon the expression,

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you don't want to engage in a paradigm where you kill them all, but they're all legitimate targets.

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And the whole point of target killing from the perspective of morality is that you are engaged in in eliminating a specific person who,

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based on intelligence information, poses an imminent threat.

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No, I have no doubt whatsoever that there are X number of people who, when they think about targeted killing, they inherently view it as immoral.

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And I respect that position. I understand that position.

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On the other hand, with all due respect to that position, the nation state absolutely has the obligation, responsibility to protect its citizens.

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On the other hand, it also has the obligation responsibility to do so in such a way that it respects the individual civil rights of the other side.

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And so what you need to understand in the context of targeted killing is when done correctly,

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it's predicated on specific action against a specific person who poses a specific threat.

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And the importance of that is that minimises, hopefully, if done correctly, this idea of collective.

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General damage right there, killing of innocent people. So when I talk about morality, ethics in the context of target killing,

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it means that I soon accept the following Hey, the target killing is necessary under certain conditions.

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B It's legal when conducted in the context of a very specific person, person and purpose, and its morality is predicated on both of those.

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And the third issue, the third leg of it, if you will, is effectiveness.

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So before undertaking a targeted killing, one needs to ask well and sells the following questions To what end are we killing this person?

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And what are the ramifications of killing that specific person?

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So one needs to think here, both tactically and strategically. So it's easy.

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I mean, easy. I mean, these are all God awful decisions. But we need to ask ourselves, okay, if we prevent,

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we kill this person and we've prevented a particular act of terrorism, does that have long term ramifications?

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Maybe. Yes, maybe not. But because you always need to think worst case scenario,

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it's always essential that you ask yourself why if you kill a person a bit, you also feel X number of innocent people.

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What are the ramifications of extended or large scale collateral damage and what are the negative negative repercussions?

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Do you have to take my word on this? I can show this to you empirically.

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That X number of targeted killings, when there's widespread collateral damage,

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invariably leads to second generation terrorism, leads to people to commit acts of terrorism.

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So you always have to ask, so what's the blowback? So when done correctly, it's extremely specific.

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And I need to put here in parentheses and this is to be very critical of, for instance,

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of the Obama administration's articulation of drone policy, which is the Israeli version of targeted killing.

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The Obama administration has come out with the following that there has been no

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collateral damage during the Obama administration's implementation of drone policy.

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And Professor Waldron's, facial response is exactly the correct one, which is like it can't be.

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And they have come out with this for the following reason because they say that when they conduct a drone policy attack,

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anybody in the milieu, whatever the [INAUDIBLE] milieu means, is a legitimate target because it is called guilt by association.

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And so all people like me who've been involved in these decisions, when they hear that everybody in the milieu is legitimate target,

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that, from my perspective, is not only immoral, but it's also illegal.

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In the same vein, I don't know how many of you read blogs. That is an article this morning by Grant by Glenn Greenwald in Salon Essay on Homecoming,

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which it turns out the minute the bomber administration is not only droning a target,

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it's also doing a secondary drone on those who come to the rescue of the target.

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And that it raises, again, from the perspective of international law, morality, effectiveness, widespread.

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QUESTION But let me give an example of how this thing works.

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3:00 in the morning, the phone rings and, you know, I answer it and Commander asks me, Are you awake?

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And those of you, I don't know, maybe you've served in the military, but if a commander at 3:00 in the morning asks you, Are you awake?

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The answer is yes. And he then tells you the following, that he's received a report from the intelligence community based on what the source told him,

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that a person who's entering his zone of combat poses an extraordinary and immediate danger to Israeli national security.

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So now let's work our way back with the most important person in this entire conversation is the intelligence community case officer.

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He's the linchpin. Why is he or she the linchpin?

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Because they're the ones who received information from a source. A source?

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A human source is the one who provides information to the intelligence community saying that such

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and such is going to occur and such and such person is going to be responsible for that act.

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So you can't really discuss Target killing without asking yourselves, who is the source?

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Who's providing this information?

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So I don't know in real life how many of you have worked in law enforcement, how many, you know, have knowledge or actually have met with sources?

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But it's a long conversation because you need to ask yourself four very important questions about the source.

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One, How reliable is that source? And reliable as incredible to how time relevant is that information?

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Did he give it a week ago? A month ago? A year ago? Three.

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How viable is that information Bible is in terms of is it realistic what he's saying and for?

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Is it corroborated because in the ideal, not always, but in the ideal, one wants to have two pieces of information.

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I'd make the crossed out in the religious sense, but corroborated in the sense that you have two sources,

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two independent sources who are providing you information.

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It's always important to note that you need to ask yourself about sources, whether or not they have an agenda,

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whether or not the person they're ratting on, you know, they have some kind of a personal grudge against them.

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And whether or not they have a personal history, whether information they've provided in the past has been affected,

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whether or not it was, you know, broad based or based on actuality and reality.

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It's always obviously very important to ask, how does the source know what the source knows?

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And I can tell you, having been on the receiving end of these kinds of conversations in various capacities, you always want to know A who's.

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Sort of. I don't care about his name, but who is he? How does he know this?

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And when did he find out?

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And why did he find it that actual three questions tie in actually directly to this idea of morality, legality and effectiveness.

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So he calls the intelligence officer. But note that here we're going to have at least three different levels of hearsay.

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Right. Because the source calls the intelligence guy in Arabic.

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But not only is he speaking Arabic, he's speaking source Arabic.

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Again, I don't know if you have, you know, firsthand experience with sources, but sources don't talk the way we talk.

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She's a whole different language. So Arabic and source Arabic calls the intelligence guy.

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The intelligence guy. Like a better term. He's the lynchpin because he translate this translates this into operational language for the commander.

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He obviously is acquainted with the source because the reason the source is calling this particular case officer,

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and he needs to translate this into something that the commander can immediately act up.

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And again, I need to emphasise in the context of targeted killing that we're talking about decisions that need to be made now.

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So the commander gets all this information operationalised, it makes it relevant to his worldview, terms of his own paradigm.

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And then according the idea of standing orders, the commander needs to call his legal adviser.

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At the end of day, the call comes to me, his legal adviser, the Gaza Strip.

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Now, the commander, when he calls me, he knows that he needs to answer he's going to answer a bunch of questions that I ask him.

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And in terms of how it's structured in the IDF, if I say no, the guy's not going to be killed.

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And if I say yes. More likely than not, the guy will be killed, but not it's the command commander's decision.

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But again, in the context of how structure in the IDF, more likely than not,

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[INAUDIBLE] obviously act in accordance with the legal advice, which is why he's calling.

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So I had worked out in advance and this is important, this conversation, a criteria based approach to targeted killing.

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One of the things that I think is important to take away from this is this idea of rational based decision making,

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because the whole idea is to minimise, you know, a little bit of this.

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The idea is to emphasise criteria based, if you will, a checklist, because if you have a checklist and you have your questions that are ready to go,

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if you get answers that you know how to plug it in and then to ask the following questions.

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So the questions that I had worked out in advance when I would get the phone call were the following one.

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I want to know from the commander, Are you in the field? Are you at home?

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Are you in your office? Are you there? And if you're there, are you the one who's going to be doing this?

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Two, I want to know, when was the last time your unit had engaged in a Night-Time ambush?

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I don't know how many of you have ever served in the military, but you don't have to take my word on this one.

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Night-Time ambush is totally different from daytime. Next, I want to know when was the last time the unit had fired at night?

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Night-Time firing. Shooting is way different from daytime for.

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I wanted to know what exactly he was seeing, whether or not what he saw fit, what the intelligence community had said.

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Next, I wanted to know what were the alternatives? Was it possible to detain the individual rather than to kill the individual?

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Obviously it's much better to detain because you can detain. You can interrogate hard to interrogate somebody who's dead.

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So I wanted to know, was he attainable? I wanted to know, perhaps most importantly of all, what was the collateral damage?

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Could we see innocents, you know, innocent individuals in that zone of combat?

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Because the great fear in the context of the targeted killings I mentioned earlier,

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is that you're going to not only kill the individual who you targeted as legitimate, but also, you know, who else is out there.

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I want to know what was his take on this conversation with the intelligence community case officer?

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And he asked him these kinds of questions. Next, I want to know whether or not the unit had recently had disciplinary issues.

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Why disciplinary issues? Because a unit that has disciplinary issues means that the commander is spending much of

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his time disciplining rather than training disciplinary rather than actual engagement.

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Also, a unit that has disciplinary issues means that, you know, in real time, you don't really know exactly how your soldiers will conduct themselves.

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And last but not least, but essentially the conversation, it was important for me to get a sense from him,

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the commander, how did he feel in terms of what he had been told versus what does he see?

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So in this particular paradigm, this particular situation, which I again, I fudge the facts,

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obviously the phone call was as follows that the intelligence community had

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indicated to him that a person wearing blue jeans and blue pants this time,

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you know, three in the morning, walking from area eight, Area B, carrying a bag in his right hand.

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And what is in the bag and this is what's important, poses an immediate and grave danger to national security.

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His early early. So three in the morning you have no one to call.

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This is the reality. The. Situation. And so I just asked him, how much time do we have to make this decision?

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The answer is we're talking here couple of minutes. By the time that I'm giving this talk right now, we will have decided.

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And that's why this criteria based approach was so absolutely important in order to minimise the subjective and enhance the objective,

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not objective, but then the, you know, the object but objective in terms of the rational based approach.

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So we ran through the questions. I get the answers or what is important emphasise is my assessment of his assessment.

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But now note the problems. One this is in the day before cell phones.

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So I first of all am not seeing what he's saying too.

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I'm not seeing his body language. It's all, you know, from phone to phone.

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What I clearly hear in his voice, obviously, is enormous, you know, tension and operational anxiety.

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I mean, there's, you know, inherent part of this entire conversation.

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And I wanted to hear from him whether he was convinced, whatever that means, that this guy was that guy.

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And if I was uncertain or if he indicated that he was uncertain, then I would say no.

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Why would I say no? Let's work our way.

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Back when I accepted the position to be the legal adviser for the Gaza Strip and my subsequent writings over the past few years in American academia,

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I have suggested proposed the following one The targeted killings indeed are lawful.

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But but here there are many buts. One that is predicated on a narrow articulation of self-defence.

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To me that this idea of morality is not just some vague and amorphous aspect of the decision making,

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but is meant that it's serious because if you don't believe in morality, in armed conflict, you obviously enhanced the number of innocent individuals.

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Three that we were fully aware of who this individual was as much as we knew,

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and always asking ourselves, how will it play out in that person's community?

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And this idea, this I'm not sure this is the correct term are those who are more sensitive something.

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They have another suggestion. It's what I call cultural anthropology.

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It's essential in the decision making process that you take into account how the other side of will will respond to this,

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what will be their understanding of it.

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And you need to understand something about terrorism, the community from which terrorists come understand why targeted killings are conducted.

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They understand why drone policy is in effect. They also understand it when you kill a terrorist, they get it.

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But what they don't get is the collateral damage. And so that's why, in terms of the cultural anthropology,

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it was really essential that we really understand exactly how important is that person in the larger context.

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And four, absolutely have to be convinced that the individual posed against this sense of immediate, imminent danger.

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And that's why this idea of alternatives in seeking alternatives is so essential.

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The Conversation. There are, of course, two other aspects of international law that are relevant to this conversation.

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One is proportionality, and the other is military necessity.

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So by example, bless you. If we received an intelligence report that somebody tomorrow is planning on throwing a molotov

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cocktail that under no circumstances would be justification for conducting a targeted killing.

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And I put in parentheses having had Molotov cocktails thrown on me.

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No, it's not particularly pleasant, but it's certainly not a reason to engage in a targeted killing.

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So in the context of proportionality,

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it's essential in the context of legality and morality that it be a significant enough threat to justify killing an individual.

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And the other aspect of international law that's absolutely central this is this idea of military necessity,

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that the threat is so significant to state security that it justifies making,

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you know, asking ourselves whether or not that person is a justifiable candidate.

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And if he doesn't pose such a threat in the context of military necessity, then, you know, you immediately say no.

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So in this particular paradigm, this example, which obviously I'm fudging the facts, at the end of the day, I said no.

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So now we need to ask ourselves, why did I say no? I said no because I had, you know, sufficient experience for this commander.

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I don't think we were friends. We had a cordial working relationship in a professional relationship.

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I felt that he was not convinced that this guy was that guy.

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Based on that. And again, you know,

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we've been through this a number of times based on that assessment and the fact that the way he was portraying what he was saying,

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what we had what I had been told, I felt that I was could not be convinced.

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I was not convinced that there was an absolute 1 to 1 relationship between individual indicated by the intelligence community,

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his assessment of it and my interpretation of that statement.

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So I stand before you and I say, I don't know if I spared the life of some guy who was wrong place,

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wrong time, or some guy who was, you know, really bad terrorist or some guy just, you know, poor schmo.

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Because for a variety of complicated reasons, which I don't want to get into at the time, we didn't do after action reports.

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But now let's fast forward and ask ourselves the following questions What makes this so

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complicated beyond the obvious complication of saying yes to the killing of somebody?

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What makes it so complicated is the nation state that's engaged in targeted killing drone policy must undertake the following difficult,

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quote unquote, assignments. One you have to narrowly defined self-defence is easy.

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It's easy to say narrowly defined self-defence. Take my word for this one.

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It's exceptionally difficult to you have to be locked in and married to the idea of morality in armed conflict.

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Three You have to have a pretty narrow definition of what's a legitimate target and what is a legitimate target.

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A legitimate target for you have to understand what it means to kill somebody.

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I mean, in terms of how it plays itself out next, you have to always be sensitive to how the court of international opinion plays itself out.

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You know, we're not operating in a vacuum. The world has things to say about all these kinds of things.

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You always have to ask yourselves, impact local community.

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You have to ask yourself, how will your own nation state respond to this?

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And finally, you have to ask yourself from the from the perspective of the decision maker,

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what I call the dilemma of the decision maker is the paradigm that you have created,

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that you have articulated and implemented, whether indeed it is in conformity with domestic law, international law.

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And again, I repeat myself deliberately this idea of morality in armed conflict.

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Before I turn the podium over to Professor Waldren,

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I want to finish with the following exactly in a half hour that it would be tried to say that these decisions are complicated.

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That's an obvious. What complicates the complication is the fact that when you think long and hard about international law, not state,

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state, but state non-state, because that's the paradigm in many of these terms have been insufficiently defined.

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I don't want to say that we're making up as we go along, but we're breaking up as we go along.

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And that means that those of us who in my former life who are engaged not in international law but in operational international law,

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are confronted with the following difficulties. There are in many ways no pre-existing paradox.

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There are no there are in many ways no existing pre-existing rules to the game.

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So on the one hand, the state absolutely is engaged in combat, in conflict with the other side.

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But it has to be must be done in such a way that you at all times, in terms of yourself, reflect respect for the law and for morality.

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Because at the end of the day, if you don't do it that way, then you've lost your sense of morality,

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you've lost your sense of law, and in many ways you've lost what you are fighting for.

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On that note, Professor Walter. Thank you.

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Professor Guiora That's hugely important in a discussion like this to have a sense of what is actually involved in the decision making

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process and then the various nodes of review and accountability in the decision making process and to have it in a human sense.

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And so I much appreciate what we have learned from Hamas today about the experience he has had and the experience

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generally in Israel and the Israeli defence forces of working with this tactic in the war against terrorism.

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I'm going to open things up just a little bit beyond the parameters of the presentation,

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because I think there are quite significant differences between the use of targeted killing by the Israeli Defence Force,

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particularly the kind of targeted and targeted killing that has just been spoken about,

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and the use of targeted killing by the United States in its operations, particularly in Afghanistan and in Pakistan.

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It's partly a matter of numbers, and the numbers are very considerable, particularly under the Obama administration.

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We estimates vary because there is no official accounting of numbers, but probably the best numbers.

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I've seen an excellent article by my NYU colleague Philip Alston in the Harvard National Security Journal for 2001,

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and he figures around 1500 militants targeted and killed by American drone attacks in Pakistan since 2004.

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That's a very, very high number,

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plus something like a collateral death rate of innocent civilians and non-combatants of around anything between five and 17% on top of that,

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including under the Obama administration.

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So the numbers are different. As far as we know, the process is a little bit different.

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We have just been talking about an IDF unit.

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Is the Israeli armed forces subject to military discipline but subject in addition to

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consultation and definitive review by a legal officer working within the armed forces,

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attacking somebody who has been identified as engaged in imminent participation in an attack.

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Somewhat different when you imagine some of the US drone attacks where you have,

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on the one hand the maintenance of a death list of operatives of al-Qaeda and some other organisations.

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You have the attack itself being carried out sometimes by people who are not subject to military discipline,

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like CIA operatives operating either as special forces or operating simply using a joystick in a in a trailer in Nevada or something like that.

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And as far as I know,

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with much less rigorous review by judge advocates or equivalent of the role that Professor Guiora played and that he outlined for us today.

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So a different process.

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We also have to worry about different criteria used in targeting and what he has written on this as well as in what he said today.

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Hamas has spoken very, very emphatically about the importance of criteria, not just judging the reliability of source,

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but using proper moral and legally respectable criteria for determining targeting the targeting decisions and then the scale.

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In today's discussion, we talked mostly about people who are directly and immediately involved in the immediate preparation

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or the immediate planning or the immediate carrying out of particular terrorist attacks.

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Now,

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that is somewhat different from an approach that also uses targeted killing as a way of decapitating the high structure of terrorist organisations,

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the high command structures, the people who are involved in various capacities such as strategic planning as opposed to tactical planning,

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people who are involved in financing, people who are involved in incitement.

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The case I have in mind is the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki recently,

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I think last September wasn't that he was a US citizen killed in in Yemen who was a preacher, but he certainly wasn't.

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Evolved. He was a very bad person recently involved in al Qaeda operations, but he wasn't involved in the particular operation.

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He was involved, as it were, in wholesale rather than retail planning and incitement of armed attacks.

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Significant case. For another reason there was represented one entire instance in which judicial review of targeting

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decisions was attempted by the man's father and by various organisations in the United States.

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And it was dismissed both on grounds of that. This was a political question,

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not subject to judicial review and on the rather astonishing ground that the

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man's father had no standing to question his son's name on a CIA death list.

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So when you were telling people like Anwar al Awlaki, you are not killing somebody who was immediately involved amongst you,

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as it were, killing this man because of his status in general planning.

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And so and I don't think that I must would disagree with me that Israel has engaged in such attacks as well,

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occasionally against high operatives in Hamas.

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And it does seem to me that in our thinking about this,

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we should reflect on the differences in the criteria that will have to be used in cases

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where you are killing somebody who is immediately involved in a particular operation,

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in cases where you are killing somebody because of their background presence in in the structure, they raise some of the same issues.

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They raise some different some different issues. The issue of collateral damage.

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Of collateral damage, what we used to call killing innocent civilians.

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The issue of killing innocent civilians is, of course, important.

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And I don't want to denigrate that some the importance when I say that the primary issue,

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the primary issue to be discussed is the legitimacy of targeted, targeted killing itself.

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And that issue has to be, I think, understood in exactly the terms that Professor Guiora mentioned in terms of its necessity.

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Notice of necessity is going to be playing two roles here.

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Military necessity is a very narrow concept. It's a use in Bello concept.

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It refers to particular armed operations, particular bombardments, particular killings.

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If you have been engaged, for example, in in taking a defended position and you have seized the defensive position,

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one of the reasons why you can't continue to fire on this is the firing has ceased to be militarily necessary.

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Military necessity does not itself justify the the recourse to arms.

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But in relation to self-defence, one might want to develop a notion of necessity, particularly when.

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And Professor Guiora didn't exactly talk about this at length,

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although he suggested that we could, if we like, have a long seminar on the meaning of imminence.

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For these purposes, we could have a long seminar on the meaning of necessity,

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particularly with regard to the decapitation version of targeted killing.

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So the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki is necessary well, necessary for why?

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Necessary as a sort of integral part of the only strategy we happen to be working with at the moment,

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necessary because we can't think what else to do with these guys necessary.

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If we were working within the confines of the particular person about to take part in the particular armed operation,

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we could work with necessity, but necessity becomes a much more elastic concept.

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It certainly doesn't mean absolutely indispensable. Everybody who is involved in large scale counter-terrorist operations will tell you that

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the most necessary thing is disruption of finance and resources and communications.

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Killing is really a small element of what's involved.

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So necessary tends to waver in between something like an indispensable part of strategy and a rather good idea for the media.

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And certainly the the law and the morality of armed conflict would from a little bit in the introduction of elasticity into the picture.

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I think it is important to do exactly what Professor Guiora suggested,

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which is as well as give us a sense of what is involved in these particular processes to help us,

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help us as citizens of the countries that may be involved in this directly or in the.

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Help us reflect upon the morality. And because the law is in flux on this and we are, as you said, making making it up as we go along.

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Reflect a little bit on the morality and the legality of these operations in a way that just stands back a little bit from the particular

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enthusiasm we might have felt for the killing of Osama bin Laden or the particular terrified response to an immediately imminent attack.

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So I want to just to finish by referring to perhaps three areas where it is worth doing some reflection.

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One is the sense that targeted killing is uncomfortably close, particularly in the decapitation model.

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But I have mentioned uncomfortably close to assassination and to resort to assassination as a means.

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I'm not an international lawyer, although I practice law about it a little bit.

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But I'm not sure that when people talked about the conditions for self-defence under Article 51 of the United Nations charter,

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they had in mind assassination so that in these circumstances, assassination of leaders of opposing forces would be appropriate.

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So certainly what the United States is conducting as part of a campaign of

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assassination does not to use assassination necessarily with question begging,

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negative associations, but it's a morally dubious practice.

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And we should, as it were, sit back and think about as opposed to what you might think of either as the depersonalised

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or indiscriminate killing involved in regular operations between rival armed forces,

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where you don't know the name of the person that you're killing.

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So that's one thing to reflect on whether we actually want to turn our soldiers into assassins, even well-reviewed and well disciplined,

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remote controlled assassins, whether we want, in fact, to introduce assassination as a major policy into our law enforcement or military models.

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And the second thing to reflect upon a little bit is the clash or the face off between a law

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enforcement model of a response to terrorism and a military model of a response to terrorism.

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Targeted killing is usually defended under the military model.

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The persons who are killed are combatants. Unlawful combatants are usually or they are civilians who are taking a direct part in hostilities.

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We use the logic of the military model,

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but the naming of the person does sound and feel an awful lot like the law enforcement model and certainly some of the

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criteria that we use that I know Israel has used since that remarkable decision in 2006 by five by the Israeli Supreme Court,

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that the possibility of capturing the targeted person has to be has to be exhausted before or impossible before the targeting can take place.

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That's not the sort of the giving quarter aspect of the capture that takes place in military operation, but it's a law enforcement model.

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So are we in danger of blurring the law enforcement model?

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And if we are,

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we should be perhaps just a little bit more worried than some of us have been about the possibility of this infecting our law enforcement approach.

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Jim, we know that in that in some United States killings in Afghanistan,

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people have been targeted because they are involved both in terrorist operations and in the drug trade.

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People have talked about the use of targeted killing in the drug trade on the Mexican-American border.

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We are worried for some of us that there is a danger that something which is being

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legitimised primarily with regard to the military model is sufficiently close,

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nevertheless, to the to the law enforcement model that it might be in general become a last resort or maybe a not so last resort.

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Intractable cases of intractable cases which probably fall within the law enforcement paradigm.

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And the last thing to remember is we have to be very careful.

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And I know there wasn't time for Professor Guiora to spend a lot of explanation on this.

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We have to be very careful with the idea that each society or the state has an obligation to protect society

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and this is primarily being carried out and undertaken in relation to that operation and that obligation.

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The obligation to protect society is something which applies to the armed forces and to the police forces.

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And to a certain extent, to the courts and to the law generally.

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So we have to be very careful about not using that phrase in a very, very cavalier way,

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because in certainly in law enforcement operations, even though there is apparent.

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Obligation to protect society and members of society from attack.

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It would be unthinkable. Or one hopes it would be unthinkable to say that this obligation justified killing.

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Certainly,

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it is true that occasionally police snipers in hostage situations and criminal situations do have to shoot a person for the defence of others.

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But that is massively exceptional.

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It is always accompanied by proper inquiry and both in Israel and and in the United Kingdom and in the United States.

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And the controls that we have on the use of force in those circumstances indicate that we should take we should be very,

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very uneasy, I think, about introducing this model into into ordinary law enforcement.

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I mean, I say that this is the last thing I'll say. I say that without any confidence that we can actually draw bright lines here.

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That's part of the difficulty. We are making it up as we go along. We are revising military doctrine, military law,

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laws of armed conflict and the morality of armed conflict to reflect the different kinds of conflict that we're facing.

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But I hope these things, these opportunities for reflection will be taken.

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Thank you.