As of writing, the most recent offensive by the IDF against a civilian target in Palestine involved the bombing of a UNRWA girls' school, at which were based 300 refugees from the bombing of other civilian infrastructures in Gaza.

It's okay.  No one died this time.  No one was injured.  I just want you to know what they did.  

UNRWA runs over two hundred schools across Gaza.  Every time there is a major Israeli offensive, refugees from the bombing flee to these schools.  100,000 Palestinians have fled to these schools during this attack, roughly doubling the number who took refuge in the buildings during Cast Lead.  

They are, in other words, well known refuges for those whom the UN calls 'internally displaced persons'.

At the moment when Israeli shells began to hit the building, there was a UN team present, inspecting damage caused by a previous attack.  They were there with Israeli clearance.

When the Israeli military began to shell this building, then, they definitely knew that it was a civilian building and that it was populated by civilians.

This is expected.  Every time Israel states that Hamas hides its rockets in hospitals, schools, homes, mosques, and ambulances, it is simply listing the targets that it intends to attack.  It openly declares this intent.

It does not, or not exactly, openly declare the intent to attack United Nations buildings.  Certainly, there were absurd rumours circulating on Israeli media that UNRWA had handed rockets over to Hamas.  But such antagonism is largely 'unofficial'.

Yet, Israel's attacks on United Nations buildings are consistent enough to merit comment.  Consider some examples.

In 1996, Israel shelled a UNIFIL compound in Qana, Southern Lebanon - which it had occupied since 1982 - killing more than 100 civilians.  The UN report on the massacre concluded that it had to have been deliberate.

In 2002, during Sharon's mauling of the West Bank, Israel repeatedly struck UN ambulances.  The commissioner-general of UNRWA stated that Israel was deliberately targeting the ambulances, while denying those it did not attack access to the injured.

In 2006, during the most recent Israeli invasion of Lebanon, the IDF bombed a well-marked, well-known UN observation post, killing UN personnel.  Israel offered a wry shrug of the shoulders: accidents happen, innocent people get killed, what a tragedy.  The UN stated that it was deliberate.

In 2009, during Operation Cast Lead, the bombing of several UN buildings led to condemnations from an otherwise extremely polite Ban Ki Moon.  UNRWA waxed furious.

The UN had, earlier in this assault, taken to issuing 'warnings' (pleas) to Israel not to bomb its buildings.  To no avail.

There are good realpolitik reasons for Israel to attack the UN.  

UN facilities provide some of the essential infrastructure that makes life liveable in Gaza.  Just as UNRWA provided some limited maintenance to Palestinian refugees after the ethnic cleansing in 1947-9, so it continues to supply non-controversial humanitarian aid.  This aid helps sustain the resilience of the population, and their ability to withstand collective punishment.

The UN also reflects a balance of international legal opinion that is potentially inhibitive of Israel's long-term objectives.  Its resolutions and statements can be troublesome, if largely ineffectual for as long as the United States is Israel's sponsor.

There is also the stagecraft of statecraft to consider.  Israel likes to strut even more than most states.  It projects omnipotence wherever it can.  It transgresses, on as many fronts as possible, as openly as possible.  That may be why the attack on a legal institution is often combined with a particularly emblematic massacre.  There, lying in a sinister rubble, is what Israel thinks of your resolutions, your outrage.

So what?  Israel is 'above the law'?  Israel thinks it is 'above the law'?  

No.  First of all, the mere fact that Israel cannot openly articulate a policy of attacking the UN indicates that it accepts that such a policy would be illegal.

More importantly, Israel needs the law.

If I be permitted a detour into first principles, I would begin like this: no law, no statehood.  'Israel' is, among other things, a social category constituted by the law.  Its existence is inseparable from an international legal order, forged through colonial relations, which upholds the rights of states.

And that legal order - not the 'international legal consensus' of the day, but the institution of law - is on Israel's side.  Such an order, partly by virtue of its colonial beginnings, is selective in favour of states, particularly powerful states, as against non-state peoples.

Israel is a state, and the Palestinians are not.  Israel has legal entitlements and resources, which the Palestinians do not.

Israel has the backing of powerful states in a legal terrain that favours powerful states, and the Palestinians do not.  

Even Israel's 'obligations' under international law - those of an occupying power - and the repeated censure for breaching them, are vastly preferable to the meagre 'rights' of a subject people.

That is why Israel could be admitted as a member state and given rights under law as early as 1949, regardless of its annexation of territory through the ethnic cleansing of a stateless people, while even UN resolution 242 - which criticised Israel's annexation of land through war with other states - did not make any specific mention of Palestinian national rights.  Indeed, such rights were not established until 2002.

Israel is not trying to place itself 'above the law'.  It is a state 'under the law' like any other.  It simply understands that, whatever the legal opinions churning out of the UN, its facts on the ground are in the long more legally efficacious.   It knows, as all powerful states do, that law is inextricable from terror.  That, in a very important way, it is terror.  It has good reason to know this, as it was founded on the principle.  

It is therefore perfectly logical that Israel would, while attempting to destroy the political basis for Palestinian statehood, terrorise the UN along the way.  If it succeeds, and if the Palestinians are finished as a political entity, that new situation will be codified in law soon enough.  

And the UN will behave.