This Article examines Israeli military lawyers’ practice of international humanitarian law (IHL) revolving around the West Bank and Gaza. Based on interviews with legal officers serving in the army between 1967–2009 and archival materials, it interrogates these lawyers’ work—the stories that they tell about law, their legal interpretations and their interactions with military decision makers. This interrogation is set in the context of broader structural, historical, and political shifts. Anchored around lawyers’ stories about law, their narration of law’s relationship with politics, and its position in relation to violence, this account sets out to contribute to discussions on lawyers’—and by extension law’s—past and present positions in states’ military affairs.

This article explores the relationship between human rights NGOs and state/military policies in the case of Israeli organisations operating in West Bank and Gaza. The article focuses on a period of fundamental change in Israel's management of the West Bank and Gaza unfolding alongside the Al-Aqsa Intifada, a transition from a framework of policing to a framework informed by the logic of war. It argues that NGO litigation, in this case, aided broader legal/political shifts that drifted away from a human rights agenda. Based on the Israeli/Palestinian case, the article aims to contribute to scholarship critically reflecting on human rights NGOs' position vis-à-vis the state and broader geo-political processes of change.

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