Editing Bombing of Dresden (section)

===Legal considerations===
{{See also|Aerial bombardment and international law#International law up to 1945}}
The [[Hague Conventions (1899 and 1907)|Hague Conventions]], addressing the codes of wartime conduct on land and at sea, were adopted before the rise of air power. Despite repeated diplomatic attempts to update enacted [[international humanitarian law]] to include aerial warfare, it was not updated before the outbreak of World War II. The absence of specific international humanitarian law does not mean that the [[laws of war]] did not cover aerial warfare, but the existing laws remained open to interpretation.<ref name="Gómez">Gómez, Javier Guisández. [http://www.icrc.org/web/eng/siteeng0.nsf/iwpList200/42F64C9A4212EA07C1256B66005C0BF1 "The Law of Air Warfare"] {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20100106232251/http://www.icrc.org/web/eng/siteeng0.nsf/iwpList200/42F64C9A4212EA07C1256B66005C0BF1|date=6 January 2010}}, ''[[International Review of the Red Cross]]'', nº 323, 20 June 1998, pp. 347–63.</ref> Specifically, whether the attack can be considered a war crime depends on whether the city was defended and whether resistance was offered against an approaching enemy. Allied arguments centre around the existence of a local air defence system and additional ground defences the Germans were constructing in anticipation of Soviet advances.<ref name="Gómez"/>