Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s order to Philippine security forces instructing them to “kill” communist terrorists last week was legal, his spokesman said on Monday.

“The president’s ‘kill, kill, kill’ order is legal because he directed … [it] at the rebels holding weapons,” Duterte’s spokesman, Harry Roque, said during a March 8 press briefing.

“Under the IHL [International Humanitarian Law], the president’s ‘kill, kill, kill’ order is right because if there is an armed conflict, when your enemy has a gun and can kill you, you wouldn’t wait to get shot and killed,” he explained.

“It is not against the law, the international humanitarian law, when a soldier shoots an armed NPA fighter and kills the NPA fighter,” Roque added, referring to the New People’s Army (NPA), which is the armed wing of the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP).

The NPA is officially recognized as a terrorist organization by the Philippine government, which has battled a guerilla insurgency by the group in the Philippine countryside for decades. The U.N. and the U.S. have declared the NPA a “foreign terrorist organization.”

Addressing ongoing attacks on rural villages by the NPA on March 5, President Duterte instructed members of the Philippine National Police and military to “kill” armed NPA members if a conflict with them arose.

“If there’s an encounter and you see them armed, kill, kill them. Don’t mind human rights. I will be the one to go to prison; I don’t have qualms,” Duterte said at a meeting of the Philippines’ National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-Eclac) in Cagayan de Oro City. Duterte created the task force to help coordinate an end to the NPA’s armed insurgency by the end of his tenure as president in 2022.

Duterte said most village chiefs in the Philippines who supported the country’s democratically-elected government “had been killed by rebels as [the] NPA continued to prey on the poor in remote villages, which are the last bastions of the insurgency,” according to the Philippine Inquirer.

“So, if you see them holding arms, shoot them, kill them,” Duterte reiterated.

“Just return the bodies to their families,” the president instructed, adding that he “welcomed those who would surrender.”

Duterte said communist rebels pose the “number one threat” to the Philippines’ national security in late June. The president made the remark during a speech condemning the NPA’s then-recent attacks on Philippine government troops distributing aid to Filipinos during the coronavirus pandemic.