The 23-year-old is one of countless civilians – men, women and children – Israel has killed since launching what legal scholars describe as a “genocidal” war on Gaza.
Israel often justifies its killings by claiming that the targets are people sympathetic or affiliated with Hamas or other armed factions. This was the justification given for killing Shabat.
Israel also regularly destroys entire neighbourhoods and buildings, killing dozens – often hundreds – at a time, ostensibly to target a single Hamas operative.
For years, Israel has tried to justify these practices by employing lawyers to create shadowy quasi-legal concepts in the hope of establishing new, dangerous precedents, according to legal scholars and experts.
However, legal scholars told Al Jazeera that neither so-called “targeted killings” nor disproportionate attacks against civilians have any grounding in international law.