Mainstream war reporting loves a neat, tidy villain. It feeds a comfortable collective delusion that conflict zones operate on the same civil societal rules as a mid-sized European democracy. When a United Nations report drops detailing that Hamas militants and local police units executed and maimed dozens of Palestinians in Gaza, the media predictably rushes to frame this as a shocking aberration, a sudden breakdown of law, or a bizarre strategic pivot.
They are asking the wrong questions, looking through the wrong lens, and completely missing the brutal, pragmatic mechanics of asymmetrical survival.
To view internal violence during a high-intensity kinetic conflict as merely a series of isolated human rights abuses is a luxury of the safe and uninformed. Having spent years analyzing security architecture and non-state actor governance in high-conflict zones, I can tell you that what the UN labels as arbitrary war crimes is actually something far more calculated: the desperate, violent maintenance of a monopoly on coercion. When a governing entity faces total external existential pressure, its internal policing does not soften; it turns cannibalistic to prevent total collapse.
The lazy consensus wants you to believe that Hamas’s internal violence is a sign of sudden madness or mindless bloodlust. The reality is far colder, far more logical, and infinitely more terrifying.
The Monopolization of Violence in a Vacuum
Every state, pseudo-state, or insurgent government relies on a single foundational pillar described by sociologist Max Weber: the monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force. When an external military force systematically dismantles the physical infrastructure of that government—bombing police stations, killing mid-level bureaucrats, cutting off communication lines—that monopoly does not just vanish cleanly. It shatters into a thousand jagged pieces.
What happens next is not a peaceful transition to civic cooperation. It is an immediate, ruthless scramble for survival.
[External Military Pressure] -> [Dismantling of Formal Infrastructure] -> [Power Vacuum] -> [Hyper-Violent Internal Policing to Prevent Coups/Anarchy]
When the UN reports that Hamas police units targeted civilians or rival factions, they are documenting the violent triage of a collapsing regime. In a besieged territory, bread is currency. Information is survival. A black market is not just an economic nuisance; it is an alternative power structure.
If a merchant horde hoards aid, or if a rival clan begins distributing food independent of the ruling faction, the central authority faces an immediate existential threat. If they lose control of the supply chain, they lose control of the population. Therefore, from a purely functionalist governance perspective, executing a suspected collaborator or maiming a black-market smuggler is not a random act of sadism. It is a calculated message sent to the rest of the population: The infrastructure may be dust, but the authority remains total.
Dismantling the People Also Ask Premise
The public discourse surrounding these reports is fundamentally broken, driven by questions that assume a reality that does not exist on the ground.
Why doesn't the population just revolt against authoritarian internal policing?
This question assumes that a population under active bombardment has the luxury of political organizing. Human behavior under extreme stress reverts to the lowest tiers of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. When survival is a minute-by-minute calculation, a population will default to whatever entity can provide a modicum of predictability, even if that predictability is enforced through extreme violence. A brutal status quo is almost always preferred by human psychology over the unpredictable chaos of a total power vacuum where armed gangs rule every street corner.
Can international human rights law deter internal violence during active warfare?
No. And pretending it can is a form of Western academic arrogance. International law operates on the assumption of future accountability, reputational risk, and state longevity. When an insurgent group or a localized police unit believes its lifespan may be measured in weeks or months, the long-term threat of an international tribunal is utterly irrelevant compared to the short-term necessity of stopping an internal informant today. Survival completely overrides compliance.
The Strategic Failure of the "Clean" War Narrative
The comfort of the standard media narrative lies in its ability to compartmentalize. It allows observers to look at a conflict and say, "Faction A is fighting Faction B, and any internal violence is just an ugly side-effect."
This is a profound misunderstanding of the nature of total collapse.
When you degrade a governing entity's ability to govern through normal bureaucratic means—courts, prisons, fines, administrative decrees—you force that entity to govern through the only mechanism it has left: raw, performative violence.
- Public Executions: These are not done out of a lack of secret spaces; they are done because a single public execution replaces the deterrent effect of a hundred functioning police cars.
- Maiming: Breaking the limbs of thieves or suspected dissenters is a low-resource method of neutralization. It requires no prison cell, no guards, and no judicial overhead. It creates a walking billboard of the consequences of non-compliance.
I have watched international observers express shock when these tactics emerge in failed states across the globe, from Sub-Saharan Africa to the Middle East. It is the same script every time. The shock itself is the real failure. It reveals a deep-seated unwillingness to accept that human beings, when stripped of institutional frameworks, will utilize terror as a highly efficient management tool.
The Downside of the Hard Truth
Admitting this reality is deeply uncomfortable because it offers no clean moral victories. If you accept that internal violence is a structural consequence of total infrastructural collapse, you have to abandon the naive hope that simply exposing these acts will cause them to stop.
The downside of this contrarian view is obvious: it can be misconstrued as a justification for atrocities. It is not. Understanding the mechanics of a disease is not the same as rooting for the virus. But until the international community stops treating internal violence in war zones as a series of surprising moral failures and starts treating it as a predictable, structural response to institutional death, its policy prescriptions will remain entirely useless.
Stop expecting besieged, radicalized enclaves to behave like Swiss cantons. The violence is the system.
You cannot bomb a regime into administrative non-existence and then act surprised when the remaining fragments use the mechanics of pure terror to keep from being swallowed whole by the chaos. The UN report didn't uncover a shift in policy; it merely documented the inevitable, bloody math of a society pushed past the brink of collapse.
