Who Is the Aggressor in the Israel-Palestine Conflict? Reading the Definition, the Deciding Forum and Each Party’s Own Counts

The current war began on 7 October 2023 with a Hamas-led assault into southern Israel in which about 1,200 people were killed and about 250 taken hostage, as the US Congressional Research Service records in its standing overview of the conflict. Aggression, however, is a defined legal term rather than a general description of who struck first or who has struck hardest: UN General Assembly Resolution 3314, adopted 14 December 1974, confines it to armed force used by one State against another, and Article 39 of the UN Charter (1945) gives the Security Council alone the power to determine that an act of aggression has occurred. No such determination on this conflict appears in the record. The determinations, orders and warrants issued since October 2023 run under other categories entirely: genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and the legality of occupation.

Key Findings

• The US Congressional Research Service records the war’s initiation as the Hamas-led assault of 7 October 2023, with roughly 1,200 people killed in Israel and about 250 taken hostage, followed by Israel’s declaration of war and its campaign in Gaza.
• UN General Assembly Resolution 3314 (XXIX), adopted 14 December 1974, defines aggression in Article 1 as armed force used by a State against the sovereignty, territorial integrity or political independence of another State; Article 3(g) reaches armed bands, groups and irregulars only where they are sent by or on behalf of a State.
• Article 8 bis of the Rome Statute, added by the 2010 Kampala amendments, makes aggression a leadership crime requiring a manifest violation of the UN Charter by character, gravity and scale; Article 15 bis withholds that jurisdiction over nationals and territory of States not party to the amendments.
• Article 39 of the UN Charter (1945) vests in the Security Council the power to determine the existence of an act of aggression, and no determination of an act of aggression in this conflict appears in the Council’s record.
• The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics reports 70,942 deaths in Gaza to the end of December 2025, a figure it attributes to the Palestinian Ministry of Health rather than measuring itself; Israel’s Foreign Ministry reports 207 hostages returned or recovered and 48 still held as of 14 September 2025, Israel’s own count.

Which party is recorded as starting the current war?

The US Congressional Research Service, in its report to Congress on the Israel and Hamas conflict, records that the war began with the Hamas-led assault into southern Israel on 7 October 2023, in which roughly 1,200 people were killed and about 250 were taken hostage, after which Israel declared war and began its campaign in Gaza. That is an official record of chronology, and on the sequence itself the documentary record is not in dispute.

The Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies, an Israeli research institute, puts 1,184 Israelis confirmed killed on the single day of 7 October 2023, and reported 1,664 Israelis confirmed killed and 17,809 wounded across the war as a cumulative total current to 5 September 2024. Those are the institute’s own figures and it credits no official body for the war totals.

Initiation of hostilities and prior warning are separate questions, and Israel’s own security service has published on the second. The Israel Security Agency’s investigation into its own conduct states that Hamas invasion plans were detected by Israeli intelligence in 2018 and again, in greater detail, in 2022, and that in the agency’s own words “these plans were never fully processed as an imminent threat, which led to a lack of preparation.” That is a party’s account of its own failure, reaching the public through Israeli press reporting in 2025, not an independent finding, and it speaks to preparedness rather than to who initiated. For a fuller account of the chronology before the attack, the dated instruments matter more than the framings attached to them.

None of these sources uses the word aggression as a legal conclusion. The Congressional Research Service records an assault and a response; the Israeli institute counts casualties; the Israeli security service accounts for warning. The legal category the reader’s question invokes is defined elsewhere, and by instruments with narrow terms.

Is it often said that Israel is the aggressor overall?

Yes, and the formal determinations issued since 2023 run overwhelmingly in one direction: the International Court of Justice issued three provisional measures orders, on 26 January, 28 March and 24 May 2024, each directed to Israel alone and none to any Palestinian party. That asymmetry is real, dated and on the record, and any answer that omits it is incomplete.

The orders’ subject matter is specific. The order of 26 January 2024 directed Israel to take all measures within its power to prevent acts within the scope of Article II of the Genocide Convention; the order of 28 March 2024 addressed the provision at scale of food, water, fuel, shelter and medical supplies; the order of 24 May 2024 addressed the military offensive in the Rafah Governorate. In September 2025 the Commission of Inquiry established by the UN Human Rights Council determined that Israel committed genocide in Gaza.

The casualty record is the other pillar of the framing. The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics reports 70,942 deaths in Gaza to the end of December 2025, attributing the figure to the Palestinian Ministry of Health rather than measuring it; the same brief puts Gaza’s population at about 2.13 million at the end of 2025, a decline of approximately 254,000 people, which the Bureau states is a decrease of 10.6% against pre-aggression population estimates, and it describes that change as the net effect of deaths, missing persons, reduced births and forced out-migration rather than a death toll.

What none of these instruments does is use the legal category the question asks about. Genocide, breaches of humanitarian access, war crimes and crimes against humanity are distinct offences with distinct elements, and a finding on any of them is not a determination of aggression. The distinction is not a technicality: as the next sections show, aggression carries its own definition, its own actor requirement and its own single deciding forum, and none of the three has been satisfied here.

What must be shown before a state is called an aggressor?

The controlling definition is 51 years old and one sentence long. Article 1 of UN General Assembly Resolution 3314 (XXIX), adopted 14 December 1974, defines aggression as “the use of armed force by a State against the sovereignty, territorial integrity or political independence of another State, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Charter of the United Nations.” Two elements do the work: a State as the actor, and another State as the object.

Article 3 of the same resolution lists the qualifying acts, among them invasion or attack by the armed forces of a State and any military occupation resulting from such invasion or attack; bombardment or the use of any weapons by a State against the territory of another State; blockade of the ports or coasts of a State; and attack on the land, sea or air forces of another State. Article 2 makes first use of armed force in contravention of the Charter prima facie evidence of an act of aggression, while leaving the Security Council to conclude otherwise in light of the circumstances, including whether the acts are of sufficient gravity.

The criminal-law version is narrower still. Article 8 bis of the Rome Statute, introduced by the amendments adopted at Kampala in 2010, defines the crime of aggression as the planning, preparation, initiation or execution, by a person in a position effectively to exercise control over the political or military action of a State, of an act of aggression which by its character, gravity and scale constitutes a manifest violation of the Charter. It is a leadership offence, tied to control of a State’s apparatus, and the manifest-violation threshold is written into the definition rather than left to argument.

Can a non-state armed group commit an act of aggression?

Under the 1974 definition, only through a State. Article 3(g) of Resolution 3314 reaches “the sending by or on behalf of a State of armed bands, groups, irregulars or mercenaries, which carry out acts of armed force against another State,” and its substantial involvement clause covers a State’s involvement in such acts.

Absent that State link, an armed group’s attack falls outside the article’s terms, and the remaining listed acts are framed as conduct by the armed forces of a State.

The consequence is a matter of category, not of gravity. An assault by a non-state armed group can amount to war crimes, to crimes against humanity, and to hostage-taking, each with its own elements and its own forum, without amounting to an act of aggression as the resolution defines it. The prosecutorial record follows that pattern: arrest warrant applications and warrants issued by the International Criminal Court from November 2024 charged figures on both sides with war crimes and crimes against humanity, and not with aggression.

The hostage question is carried by each party’s own reporting. Israel’s Foreign Ministry states that 207 hostages have returned or been recovered, 148 alive and 59 deceased, and that 48 remained in captivity as of 14 September 2025, 712 days after the abduction. Those are Israel’s own counts, published by a party to the conflict, and they are not independently verified.

So the label the question reaches for is unavailable to describe 7 October 2023 in law, while several other labels are available and in use. That is why chronology and characterisation come apart here: a report can state, on an official record, which party initiated the fighting, and state, on the treaty texts, that the initiation is prosecuted under other headings. The legal record on war crimes is where the charged conduct on both sides actually sits.

Which forum can rule on aggression, and has one been asked?

Two forums could in principle decide, and neither has decided here. Article 39 of the UN Charter, in force since 1945, provides that the Security Council “shall determine the existence of any threat to the peace, breach of the peace, or act of aggression” and shall decide what measures follow. That power sits with the Council and with no other organ, and no determination of an act of aggression in this conflict appears in its record.

Source: the instruments named, as published by the UN and the Rome Statute’s depositary.

The Rome Statute route is closed twice over. Article 15 bis conditions the Court’s exercise of aggression jurisdiction on the State link, and Israel is not a State Party to the Statute; the crime is also confined to persons in a position to control the political or military action of a State, which excludes the non-state actor question addressed above.

That leaves the Council, where the constraint is procedural rather than evidentiary. A determination under Article 39 is an adopted decision, subject to the veto held by each permanent member, and draft resolutions on this conflict have failed on that vote since October 2023. The absence of an aggression determination is therefore a fact about the voting record, not a judgment about the underlying conduct, and it is recorded here as exactly that.

What does Israel’s own record state about the war’s initiation?

Israel’s own published position rests the campaign on the 7 October assault and states its objectives in operational terms. The Permanent Mission of Israel to the Multilateral Organizations in France, in a statement last updated 17 September 2025, reports 48 hostages still held as of 14 September 2025, 712 days after the abduction, alongside 207 returned or recovered, and frames the operation around hostage recovery and the dismantling of Hamas military capability.

Those are Israel’s own counts, self-published by a party to the conflict.

The Charter provision Israel’s framing invokes is Article 51, which preserves “the inherent right of individual or collective self-defence if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations” until the Security Council has taken measures to maintain international peace and security. The article is treaty text and states a right; it contains no mechanism by which a party’s invocation of it is confirmed.

On conduct within the campaign, Israel publishes its own machinery and its own counts. The Military Advocate General’s Corps reported 74 criminal investigations opened as of 3 August 2024, comprising 44 concerning the death of detainees held by the IDF, 8 alleged detainee mistreatment, 13 alleged pillaging or stealing, 6 alleged illegal use of force and 3 alleged destruction of civilian property without military necessity, alongside over 1,000 incidents referred to the General Staff’s Fact-Finding and Assessment Mechanism.

The threshold that generates those counts is stated by the Corps itself: in armed conflict, “death or injury to a civilian or harm to civilian objects, while tragic and regrettable, in most cases do not by themselves indicate a reasonable suspicion of criminal conduct, as they can be explained as reasonable aftermath of lawful operational activity.” The 74 are investigations opened, not findings, indictments or convictions, and they are the IDF’s own count of its own processes.

In a briefing of 29 February 2024, the IDF Spokesperson stated that over 13,000 people the IDF describes as terrorists had been eliminated in Gaza since the war began. The classification is the IDF’s own characterisation, combatant and civilian counts in this conflict are contested, and the figure is written as a floor.

Does an unlawful occupation make one party the aggressor?

Occupation legality has been ruled on, and the ruling is separate from the aggression question. Following the International Court of Justice advisory opinion of 19 July 2024 on the legal consequences of Israel’s policies in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution on 18 September 2024 by a recorded vote of 124 in favour.

The same UN General Assembly vote also recorded 14 against and 43 abstentions, with 181 of the Assembly’s 193 members recording a position.

Neither the opinion nor the resolution makes a determination of aggression.

Occupation does appear in the 1974 definition, but only in a specific position. Article 3(a) of Resolution 3314 lists the invasion or attack by the armed forces of a State against the territory of another State, “or any military occupation, however temporary, resulting from such invasion or attack, or any annexation by the use of force.” Occupation enters as a consequence of a qualifying act between States, and the actor requirement and the Council’s Article 39 role are unchanged by it.

Israel’s own highest court has addressed the domestic constitutional side of the questions surrounding the territories and the character of the state. In HCJ 5555/18 Hasson v. Knesset, decided 8 July 2021, an eleven-justice panel of the Supreme Court sitting as High Court of Justice dismissed fifteen petitions against Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People, upholding the law while holding that the Knesset as constituent authority is “not all powerful” and lacks authority, even by Basic Law, to deny the core character of the state as Jewish and democratic. That is an Israeli court on an Israeli statute, and it speaks to constitutional limits rather than to the conduct of the war.

The two questions therefore travel separately in the record: one line of instruments addresses the lawfulness of a continued presence and the obligations flowing from it, another addresses the use of force between States and who may declare it aggression. Neither answers the other, and the conditions each party sets for a settlement sit in a third register again.

Where do analysts disagree about naming one aggressor?

The disagreement is substantially about the inputs. The Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs, in its 2025 essay The Death of Genocide, sets a ceiling of at most 41,000 civilians in Gaza who have died in war-related causes, derived by its own arithmetic subtracting estimated natural deaths and Israel’s estimate of Hamas fighters killed from the Gaza Ministry of Health total.

The same page states that neither the Hamas claim of 67,000 total deaths nor the Israeli estimate of 21,000 Hamas fighters killed has been independently confirmed, so the ceiling is publisher arithmetic on inputs supplied by parties to the conflict.

Coverage volume is contested on the same pattern. CAMERA, a monitoring organisation with an advocacy mission, coded the headlines of over 2,500 BBC News articles published between 7 October 2023 and 7 October 2025 and reported that 35% were critical of Israel against 11% critical of Hamas, with 45 headlines featuring claims of genocide, famine or starvation in Gaza. CAMERA performed the coding itself, so the shares rest on its own judgment of what counts as critical rather than on an independently replicated method.

NGO Monitor, also a monitoring organisation with an advocacy mission, reported in its 2024 annual report that it had identified 157 groups in the United States linked to an anti-Israel network, with over 3,000 connections, and 111 groups in Canada with over 1,800 connections. The mapping’s inclusion criteria and method are not stated in the report.

On the other side of the dispute stand the September 2025 determination of the Commission of Inquiry established by the UN Human Rights Council and the three 2024 provisional measures orders of the International Court of Justice, described above. The Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies analyses the offensive chronology from the Israeli side, reporting cumulative Israeli casualty totals current to 5 September 2024.

What the disagreement does not contain is a competing aggression determination. The parties to the argument dispute counts, methods and characterisations of conduct, and the deciding forum identified in Article 39 has issued nothing for either side to contest.

How does aggressor framing appear in measured online discourse?

Blame framing is measurable, and it has been measured. Becker, Ascone and Troschke (2022), in a peer-reviewed study of 4,500 comments on the Facebook pages of leading British, French and German media outlets reacting to the May 2021 escalation, coded 26.9% of 1,504 UK comments as antisemitic; within that antisemitic subset, 27.9% assigned Israel sole guilt for the conflict, and 5.2% used an apartheid analogy.

The same study found that thread context was needed to infer the antisemitic meaning in 38.7% of the UK antisemitic comments, so the coding rests on conversational setting rather than keywords alone.

Volume rose sharply with the current war. Guerra, Lepre and Karakuş (2024), in a preprint analysing over 450,000 posts and comments across four subreddits between 7 October 2023 and 3 January 2024, recorded daily post volume near 10,000 at the conflict’s onset, a seven-day moving average above 8,000 through November and about 6,000 by December, with extremity-score peaks coinciding with offline conflict events. The measure is a lexicon-based extremity score, not an assessment of any claim’s merits.

Some of that volume was organised. Elmas and colleagues (2026), in a preprint covering 4,570,633 tweets from 1,521,433 users between 1 September and 15 December 2023, identified 11 coordinated groups involving 541 accounts, relying on retweet amplification and copy-paste diffusion; of 191 highly amplified coordinated posts, 12 were assessed as misleading, concentrated in 3 of the 11 groups, while the remaining groups primarily engaged in advocacy, religious solidarity or humanitarian mobilisation. The authors document amplification, not funding, and make no finding of centralised or external financing.

Attitudes moved alongside the framing. Ozer, Obaidi and Bergh (2025), in two experiments with British samples (n = 354 and n = 490) priming war-in-Gaza material, found political orientation associated with anti-Jewish hostility through social dominance orientation on one pathway, and conservative orientation negatively associated with antisemitism through out-group identity fusion with the Palestinian people on a separate pathway that conflates attitudes toward Israel with prejudice toward Jews. Both are measured associations from the study’s abstract, not causal findings.

Methodology

This report reads the question through the legal category it invokes and the record around that category: the instruments that define aggression, the forum empowered to determine it, the recorded votes, each party’s own published counts, and the peer-reviewed measurement of how the framing circulates.

Four source types carry the findings. Treaty and instrument texts (the UN Charter of 1945, UN General Assembly Resolution 3314 (XXIX) of 14 December 1974, and the Rome Statute of 1998 with its 2010 Kampala amendments) are quoted from their own published texts and support statements about what they require, never about anyone’s compliance with them. Official records include the US Congressional Research Service report to Congress and the General Assembly’s recorded vote of 18 September 2024, cited with its full tally and denominator. Party-published counts include the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics brief for the end of 2025 (which relays the Palestinian Ministry of Health death total rather than measuring it), the Israeli Foreign Ministry’s hostage and aid figures, the IDF Spokesperson’s 29 February 2024 briefing, the Military Advocate General’s Corps investigation counts with the threshold the Corps itself states, and the Israel Security Agency’s account of its own pre-attack intelligence handling. Each of these is a count published by a party to the events and is labelled as such throughout; none is independently verified.

Research and monitoring publications carry the disagreement section. The Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs ceiling of at most 41,000 is the publisher’s own arithmetic on inputs supplied by parties, and its own page states that neither input has been independently confirmed. CAMERA and NGO Monitor are monitoring organisations with advocacy missions that performed their own coding and mapping; NGO Monitor’s inclusion criteria are not published. The Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies credits no official body for its cumulative Israeli casualty totals.

Two of the discourse studies are preprints and are labelled at first use (Guerra, Lepre and Karakuş, 2024; Elmas and colleagues, 2026). Becker, Ascone and Troschke (2022) is peer-reviewed; its trope shares are shares of the comments coded antisemitic within each national sample, not of all comments, and the categories are non-exclusive and must not be summed. Ozer, Obaidi and Bergh (2025) is peer-reviewed and read from its abstract, so its findings are carried as measured associations with the authors’ own framing.

Determinations and orders issued by the International Court of Justice, the International Criminal Court and the Commission of Inquiry established by the UN Human Rights Council are named and dated where they are the substance of a widely held framing, and each is described by what it addressed. The absence of any determination of an act of aggression under Article 39 of the UN Charter is stated as a fact about the Security Council’s voting record over the period, which is what the record supports and no more.

Conclusion

So who is the aggressor. On the sequence, the Congressional Research Service records the war beginning with the Hamas-led assault of 7 October 2023, about 1,200 people killed and about 250 taken hostage. On the term itself, Resolution 3314 confines aggression to armed force between States and reaches armed groups only when a State sends them; Article 8 bis of the Rome Statute ties the crime to leaders who control a State’s apparatus, and Article 15 bis withholds that jurisdiction over non-party States; Article 39 of the Charter gives one body the power to declare it, and that body has declared nothing here. The word the question asks for is, in law, currently unassignable in this conflict.

What the record does hold is voluminous and one-sided in direction. Three provisional measures orders in 2024 ran to Israel alone; a Commission of Inquiry determined genocide in September 2025; a recorded vote of 124 to 14 with 43 abstentions followed a ruling on the lawfulness of the occupation. Israel publishes its own counts against that: 48 hostages held as of 14 September 2025, 74 criminal investigations opened by its Military Advocate General as of 3 August 2024, and the threshold that produces that number. Research institutes on either side contest the inputs, not the definition, and the Jerusalem Center’s 41,000 ceiling is arithmetic performed on figures its own page says are unconfirmed.

Into that vacuum the word travels anyway, and it does not travel alone. In the comments Becker, Ascone and Troschke coded from British, French and German media pages in 2021, 27.9% of the UK comments judged antisemitic held Israel solely guilty for the conflict; 39.8% carried an evil stereotype; 8.1% reached for blood libel. Ozer, Obaidi and Bergh measured a pathway on which fusion with one people’s cause runs into hostility toward another. When a legal category with a defined actor, a defined act and a single deciding forum is replaced in ordinary speech by a moral verdict anyone may issue, what fills the gap between the definition and the verdict, and does the vocabulary that fills it carry anything into public argument that the legal term never contained?

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the difference between an act of aggression and a war crime?

They sit in different bodies of law. Aggression, as defined in Article 1 of UN General Assembly Resolution 3314 (1974) and Article 8 bis of the Rome Statute, concerns the resort to armed force by a State against another State and, in criminal form, the leaders who direct it. War crimes concern conduct during hostilities and apply to combatants on all sides regardless of who resorted to force first.

Who publishes the death counts used in this argument?

The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics reports 70,942 deaths in Gaza to the end of December 2025, a figure it attributes to the Palestinian Ministry of Health rather than measuring itself. The same brief separately estimates a net population decline of approximately 254,000 people, which it states is a decrease of 10.6% against pre-aggression population estimates, and attributes that change to deaths, missing persons, reduced births and out-migration together.

What did Israel’s security agency say it knew before 7 October 2023?

The Israel Security Agency’s own investigation states that Hamas invasion plans were detected by Israeli intelligence in 2018 and again, in greater detail, in 2022, and that “these plans were never fully processed as an imminent threat, which led to a lack of preparation.” It is a party investigating itself, reported through Israeli press outlets in 2025, and it addresses preparedness rather than initiation.

Do public-opinion surveys identify an aggressor?

They measure sympathy, not responsibility. On Gallup’s February 2025 reading of 1,004 US adults, 46% sympathised more with the Israelis, the lowest in 25 years of the trend, and 33% more with the Palestinians, the highest by two points, with a margin of error of about 4 points. The question is a forced choice between two named parties, and Gallup’s own methodology work documents that its placement within a survey changes the shares it produces.

Does Resolution 3314 say anything about territory gained through force?

Yes. Article 5(3) of the 1974 resolution provides that no territorial acquisition or special advantage resulting from aggression is or shall be recognised as lawful, and Article 5(1) states that no consideration of whatever nature may serve as a justification for aggression. Article 3(a) lists annexation by the use of force among the qualifying acts.

What does the IDF’s own ethical code require of soldiers?

Its Purity of Arms value states that a soldier “will not use their weapon or power to harm uninvolved civilians and prisoners and will do everything in their power to prevent harm to their lives, bodies, dignity and property,” and its Discipline value states that a soldier will “ensure they are only giving out legal orders, and do not follow illegal orders.” The code records a stated standard, published by the party it binds, and no figure about conduct follows from it.

Sources

• Becker, M., Ascone, L., and Troschke, H., 2022. Antisemitic Comments on Facebook Pages of Leading British, French, and German Media Outlets. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications. DOI 10.1057/s41599-022-01337-8. Peer-reviewed.
• Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies, 2025. The Gaza Terror Offensive to 1 August to 5 September 2024. besacenter.org. Research institute.
• CAMERA, 2025. Analysis of BBC News headlines shows scale of anti-Israel bias. camera.org. Monitoring organization (advocacy mission).
• Elmas, T., Silva, M., Pote, M., and colleagues, 2026. Israel-Hamas War on X: A Case Study of Coordinated Campaigns and Information Integrity. arXiv:2604.10566. Preprint.
• Gallup, 2025. Middle East sympathies trend series. news.gallup.com/poll/1639. Named survey organisation.
• Guerra, J., Lepre, B., and Karakuş, M., 2024. Quantifying Extreme Opinions on Reddit Amidst the 2023 Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. arXiv:2412.10913. Preprint.
• Israel Defense Forces, 2024. Press Briefing by IDF Spokesperson, February 29th, 2024. idf.il. Official record (a party’s own count).
• Israel Defense Forces. The Spirit of the Israel Defense Forces. idf.il. Official record (a party’s own published doctrine).
• Israel Defense Forces, Military Advocate General’s Corps, 2024. Addressing Alleged Misconduct in the Context of the War in Gaza, updated 3 August 2024. idf.il. Official record (a party’s own count).
• Israel Security Agency, 2025. Findings of its own investigation into 7 October, as reported by Ynetnews and The Times of Israel. Official record (a party’s own inquiry into its own conduct).
• Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Permanent Mission of Israel to the Multilateral Organizations in France, 2025. Israel’s Objectives and Current Operation, updated 17 September 2025. embassies.gov.il. Official record (a party’s own count).
• Israeli Supreme Court sitting as High Court of Justice, 2021. HCJ 5555/18 Hasson v. Knesset, judgment of 8 July 2021. Official record (court judgment).
• Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs, 2025. The Death of Genocide. jcfa.org. Research institute.
• NGO Monitor, 2025. Annual Report 2024. ngo-monitor.org. Monitoring organization (advocacy mission).
• Ozer, S., Obaidi, M., and Bergh, R., 2025. The Impact of Globalized Conflicts: Examining Attitudes Toward Jews Among Britons in the Political Context of the War in Gaza. International Journal of Intercultural Relations, vol. 107. DOI 10.1016/j.ijintrel.2025.102184. Peer-reviewed (abstract-sourced).
• Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, 2025. A Brief on the Status of the Palestinian People at the End of 2025. pcbs.gov.ps. Official record.
• Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, 1998, with the amendments on the crime of aggression adopted at Kampala in 2010, Articles 8 bis and 15 bis. Treaty text.
• United Nations, 1945. Charter of the United Nations, Articles 39 and 51. un.org. Treaty text.
• United Nations General Assembly, 1974. Resolution 3314 (XXIX), Definition of Aggression, adopted 14 December 1974. un.org. Official record (adopted resolution).
• United Nations General Assembly, 2024. Resolution adopted 18 September 2024 by a recorded vote of 124 in favour, 14 against, 43 abstentions. un.org. Official record (recorded vote).
• US Congressional Research Service. Israel and Hamas Conflict In Brief: Overview, U.S. Policy, and Options, report R47828. congress.gov. Official record.