JURIST - Paper Chase: Israel's targeted killings of terrorist leaders are lawful

In a speech Wednesday in Massachusetts and in an op-ed published Tuesday in the Toronto Globe and Mail, Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz says that Israel's policy of assassinating dangerous Palestinian militants is legal in international law, and perhaps in some circumstances even advisable.

In 2002, in response to several petitions by human rights groups, Israel's Supreme Court ruled that the Israeli policy of "targeted killings" was a means of warfare against terrorism and therefore non-justiciable. See Justice-Ability: A Critique of the Alleged Non-Justiciability of Israel's Policy of Targeted Killings[PDF], an article by Orna Ben-Naftali and Keren R. Michaeli of Tel Aviv Law School in the August 2003 issue of the Journal of International Criminal Justice.