Gaza Crisis in the Balance of Responsibility to Protect Doctrine

The Responsibility to Protect (R2P) doctrine is one of the new legal concepts in international law which is based on the theoretical foundations of "human security" and "humanitarian intervention". The introduction of the doctrine raised many hopes for removing the shortages of humanitarian intervention due to issues such as "selectivism" and "national interest– driven intentions of interventionist states". The Gaza crisis in 2007 is an appropriate case for testing the capabilities of this doctrine. Therefore, the main question of this article is that can, in theory, the R2P doctrine be an appropriate legal basis for international reactions to protect civilian inhabitants of the land of Gaza against the Zionist regime's operations? Our transitory answer as a hypothesis to this question is that given the widespread and gross violation of human rights following the surrounding of Gaza and imposition of a 22- day war on its inhabitants, there is a necessary legal basis for implementing the R2P doctrine to protect Gaza's inhabitants. The secondary question of this article is related to the evaluation of the functions of predicted qualified authorities in the framework of the R2P doctrine during the Gaza crisis.