this post was submitted on 04 Sep 2024
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Ukrainian drones now spray 4,000° F thermite streams right into Russian trenches (arstechnica.com)
submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 241 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (43 children)

This is what international law has to say about incendiary weapons:

  1. It is prohibited in all circumstances to make the civilian population as such, individual civilians or civilian objects the object of attack by incendiary weapons.
  1. It is prohibited in all circumstances to make any military objective located within a concentration of civilians the object of attack by air-delivered incendiary weapons.
  1. It is further prohibited to make any military objective located within a concentration of civilians the object of attack by means of incendiary weapons other than air-delivered incendiary weapons, except when such military objective is clearly separated from the concentration of civilians and all feasible precautions are taken with a view to limiting the incendiary effects to the military objective and to avoiding, and in any event to minimizing, incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians and damage to civilian objects.
  1. It is prohibited to make forests or other kinds of plant cover the object of attack by incendiary weapons except when such natural elements are used to cover, conceal or camouflage combatants or other military objectives, or are themselves military objectives.

This treeline is clearly not located within a concentration of civilians and it is concealing (or plausibly believed to be concealing) enemy combatants and therefore the use of incendiary weapons is unambiguously legal.

[–] [email protected] 36 points 2 months ago (3 children)

Interestingly Israel has violated all three of these on hundreds of occasions in Gaza.

[–] [email protected] -5 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

What occasions are you referring to? I know people claim that Israeli use of white phosphorous munitions is illegal, but the law is actually quite specific about what an incendiary weapon is. Incendiary effects caused by weapons that were not designed with the specific purpose of causing incendiary effects are not prohibited. (As far as I can tell, even the deliberate use of such weapons in order to cause incendiary effects is allowed.) This is extremely permissive, because no reasonable country would actually agree not to use a weapon that it considered effective. Something like the firebombing of Dresden is banned, but little else.

Incendiary weapons do not include:

(i) Munitions which may have incidental incendiary effects, such as illuminants, tracers, smoke or signalling systems;

(ii) Munitions designed to combine penetration, blast or fragmentation effects with an additional incendiary effect, such as armour-piercing projectiles, fragmentation shells, explosive bombs and similar combined-effects munitions in which the incendiary effect is not specifically designed to cause burn injury to persons, but to be used against military objectives, such as armoured vehicles, aircraft and installations or facilities.

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