{"id":6224,"date":"2026-05-29T00:40:37","date_gmt":"2026-05-28T22:40:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lma\/index.php\/2026\/05\/29\/droit-sous-sanctions-4\/"},"modified":"2026-05-29T00:59:24","modified_gmt":"2026-05-28T22:59:24","slug":"droit-sous-sanctions-4","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mezghena.org\/index.php\/en\/2026\/05\/29\/droit-sous-sanctions-4\/","title":{"rendered":"Law under sanctions"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

In Gaza, Lebanon and around Iran, international law has not disappeared. It is invoked, bypassed, sanctioned and instrumentalised. This obstructed presence reveals the current crisis with particular clarity: the legal order exists, but its application remains brutally dependent on the balance of power.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

May 2026 offered an almost pedagogical sequence. In Gaza, Israeli strikes again killed Palestinians despite a ceasefire presented as in force but fragile. In Lebanon, Israel and Lebanon extended a ceasefire by 45 days, supposedly to contain the confrontation with Hezbollah, while new strikes showed that a truce does not mean peace. In The Hague, the International Criminal Court had to deny that it had issued new arrest warrants in the situation concerning Palestine, a sign that international justice itself has become an informational front. In Brussels, the European Union targeted certain Israeli settlers and expanded sanctions against Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad officials, without crossing the threshold of a strategic break with Israel. At the same time, Washington and Tehran were still negotiating a provisional framework around a ceasefire and the Strait of Hormuz, with no confirmed final agreement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Taken separately, these facts belong to different files. Taken together, they draw a harsher map: that of a Middle East where war continues under legal language, where sanctions often replace responsibility, and where ceasefires become less exits from crisis than tools for managing military intensity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Gaza: ceasefire as administrative fiction<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

In Gaza, the word \u201cceasefire\u201d is no longer enough to describe reality. Reuters reported on 10 May 2026 that Israeli strikes killed at least three Palestinians, according to medical officials, in a sequence presented as a test of a ceasefire negotiated under US sponsorship. Diplomatic language says \u201ctruce\u201d, \u201cplan\u201d, \u201cimplementation\u201d, \u201cnext phase\u201d. The ground says something else: deaths, displacement, military control, insufficient humanitarian aid, constrained access.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

OCHA humanitarian reports confirm a central fact: the catastrophe is not only the product of past bombardments. It continues through territorial fragmentation, difficulty in accessing relief, destruction of infrastructure and exhaustion of humanitarian capacity. Aid saves lives, but it does not restore a society. It keeps bodies alive in a space where the political conditions of life are methodically narrowed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is where law becomes visible through its impotence. The rules on civilian protection, humanitarian access, proportionality and distinction between combatants and non-combatants exist. They are not unknown to states, armies or Western diplomacies. But their application depends on a political threshold: when does an alleged violation become sanctionable? Who decides the cost? At what point does military, diplomatic or commercial support become political complicity?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The European response remains fragmented. The Foreign Affairs Council of the European Union expressed on 11 May its deep concern over the humanitarian crisis in Gaza and the blocked implementation of the plan linked to Resolution 2803. But institutional concern does not automatically produce leverage. The European Union knows how to name the crisis. It struggles to transform that diagnosis into a coherent instrument of pressure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The ICC, or law under political surveillance<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The International Criminal Court\u2019s denial of 17 May 2026 matters precisely because it appeared technical. The ICC denied issuing new arrest warrants in the situation concerning Palestine after Israeli press reports. The raw fact is simple: no new warrants on that date. But the episode says more than that. It shows that international justice no longer acts only inside courtrooms. It acts under permanent media, diplomatic and political pressure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Since the ICC entered files touching major allies of Western powers, it has itself become a target of contestation, sanctions and delegitimisation. The message sent to international jurisdictions is brutal: investigating declared enemies is tolerated; investigating strategic partners becomes suspect. International criminal law, built after the catastrophes of the twentieth century to limit impunity for the gravest crimes, runs into its old wall: the material inequality between weak defendants and protected states.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The writing must therefore be careful. The qualifications of war crime, crime against humanity or genocide must not be thrown around as slogans. They belong to legal authorities, documented reports, procedures, material elements and intentional elements. But legal caution must not become moral neutralisation. Refusing to invent a legal qualification does not mean refusing to see the facts. It means establishing them more firmly, to prevent their erasure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lebanon: a truce under strikes<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

In Lebanon, the logic is different but the mechanism is similar. Reuters reported on 15 May 2026 that Israel and Lebanon had accepted a 45-day extension of their ceasefire following talks facilitated by Washington. On paper, the truce contains the war. In practice, strikes continue, accusations cross, Hezbollah remains at the centre of Israel\u2019s security architecture, and Security Council Resolution 1701 remains the legal framework regularly invoked but unevenly applied.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

UNIFIL recalls that its mandate is to support the implementation of that resolution and monitor violations. This is an essential point. South Lebanon is not a legal void. On the contrary, it is one of the most legally framed spaces in the region. Yet this framework prevents neither strikes, nor overflights, nor responses, nor alleged violations. Law sets an architecture. Power often decides its degree of effectiveness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Israeli strike reported on 28 May in Beirut\u2019s southern suburbs, close to an important diplomatic moment, illustrates this tension. A negotiation can take place in Washington while a military operation redefines the balance of power on the ground. Law then serves as the frame for discussion, while the strike serves as the real punctuation mark. This is not an accidental contradiction: it is the grammar of contemporary managed conflicts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Iran: negotiating under threat, sanctioning under condition<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The Iranian file gives this sequence its strategic depth. The information available in May 2026 points to a provisional framework discussed between Washington and Tehran, with the Strait of Hormuz, oil sanctions, nuclear guarantees and the ceasefire as bargaining objects. At this stage, nothing allows one to speak of a firmly concluded final agreement. The vocabulary must remain exact: discussions, framework, memorandum, possible provisional agreement, not a stabilised treaty.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Iran is not Gaza, and Lebanon is not Iran. Confusing them would produce a lazy map of a single \u201cregional front\u201d. But the files speak to one another. Sanctions against Tehran, strikes in Lebanon, the war in Gaza and the balances of the Gulf form a system of pressure. Each actor tries to turn one front into leverage over another: Israel through military pressure, the United States through sanctions and negotiation, Iran through regional depth, armed actors through disruptive capacity, Europeans through a normative language often stronger than their decisions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is where sanctions become central. A sanction can be a legal tool, a diplomatic instrument, an economic punishment or a political signal. But when it is applied asymmetrically, it ceases to be only a mechanism of accountability. It becomes a measure of international hierarchy. Some actors are isolated, others are reminded of limits, and others are protected by their strategic usefulness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

European sanctions announced against Israeli settlers or structures linked to violence in the West Bank, alongside the expansion of sanctions targeting Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, show this ambivalence. They say that a limit exists. They also say that this limit remains calibrated. Sanctioning individuals or peripheral entities does not carry the same weight as challenging a central military, commercial or diplomatic relationship.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Law is not weak: it is obstructed<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The easy conclusion would be to say that international law is useless. That would be false. States fear it enough to bypass it. Armies cite it enough to justify their operations. Victims invoke it enough to document crimes. Powers watch it closely enough to sanction or intimidate those who seek to apply it against their allies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The problem, then, is not the absence of law. The problem is the political distribution of its effectiveness. In Gaza, the humanitarian rule exists but clashes with military control and alliances. In Lebanon, Resolution 1701 exists but depends on the armed balance on the ground. Facing Iran, norms of non-proliferation, freedom of navigation and economic sanctions become bargaining chips. At the ICC, procedure exists but advances through a field mined by pressure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What the Gaza-Lebanon-Iran sequence reveals is an international order that is not collapsing in silence: it functions at two speeds, before our eyes. It is strong against the weak, cautious with the useful, hesitant before allies, ferocious against designated adversaries. Law remains necessary, but it is not sovereign. It needs evidence, judges, reports and procedures. Above all, it needs a political balance of power capable of preventing its universality from being turned into decoration.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The scandal is not that international law is invoked. The scandal is that it is invoked everywhere and applied so little where it truly disturbs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nadir Amrouche<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Sources utilis\u00e9es<\/h2>\n\n\n