Just seven weeks before the accident, Israel’s High Court of Justice had ruled on the legality of the settler quarries in the West Bank. International law prohibits an occupying power from plundering the resources of the occupied. Pillage is a war crime. But the court ruled unanimously that the state was permitted to exploit the West Bank’s natural resources. The reason given by its president, Dorit Beinisch, who was considered a liberal justice in Israel, was that the occupation was so long-standing that it required the “adjustment of the law to the reality on the ground.”
