Orna Ben-Naftali

Orna Ben-Naftali is an Israeli legal academic and commentator on human rights in Israel. She is Professor of Jurisprudence and international law at The College of Management Academic Studies, where she has also served as the Dean of Law Studies.

Ben-Naftali studied law at Tel Aviv University, Harvard University and the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. She serves on the editorial board of the European Journal of International Law, and is an executive board member of B'Tselem. She has been a critic of what she sees as the evasive application of international law in the occupied Palestinian territories:

A situation is created in which the majority of the adult men in Gaza and the majority of the buildings can be treated as legitimate targets. The law has actually been stood on its head. It has ceased to fulfill its purpose, and so we have to admit that it has gone into dissolution procedures ahead of bankruptcy.

In 2012 she was one of seven international lawyers who provided a legal opinion in support of Yesh Din's challenge to the legality of Israeli-operated quarries in the West Bank.

• (with Keren Michaeli) '"We Must Not Make a Scarecrow of the Law": A Legal Analysis of the Israeli Policy of Targeted Killings', Cornell International Law Journal, Vol. 36 (2003), pp. 233–292
• (with Yuval Shany) 'Living in Denial: The Application of Human Rights in the Occupied Territories', Israel Law Review 17 (2003-2004), p. 37
• (with Aeyal Gross and Keren Michaeli) 'Illegal Occupation: The Framing of the Occupied Palestinian Territory', Berkeley Journal of International Law. Vol. 23 (2005), p. 551
• (with Miri Sharon) 'What the ICJ Did Not Say about the Duty to Punish Genocide', Journal of International Criminal Justice, Vol. 5, no. 4 (2007), pp. 859–74.
• (ed.) International Humanitarian Law and International Human Rights Law. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2011