Do Palestinians have a legal right to resist Israel’s military occupation?

During World War II, Allied powers gave military assistance to resistance forces (“freedom fighters”) in territories occupied by Nazi Germany. No one questioned the right of those resistance forces to fight the Nazis. In fact, their resistance was assumed to be an “inherent right.”

In 1977, the Geneva Convention was amended to say that armed struggle can be used, as a last resort, by people in occupied lands. Fully 177 countries (nearly every country around the globe except Israel) agreed, and signed onto this amendment. And who would argue that, after 57 years of increasingly harsh, suffocating military occupation, the people in the occupied territories of the West Bank and Gaza are not at a point of last resort?

The people of Palestine have a right under international law to resist their military occupiers, including by armed force (although not by harming civilians).