Israel’s threatened full-scale occupation of the narrow coastal strip is now under way, and with it the forced displacement of a million people in Gaza City to the so-called safe humanitarian area of Al-Mawasi. THE recent UN Commission of Inquiry, which concluded that four of the five acts constituting genocidal intent have been committed in Gaza (News, 19 September), underscores the fact that the future of the Palestinian people and their hopes for a nation state now hang in the balance — as does the principle that wars have rules: rules that were hard won and born of the bitter experience of human suffering during past conflicts.