Here then lay the Philippine government’s legal game: What if those “islands” were not really islands in the UNCLOS sense? Many of them disappear into the water at high tide. What if they were merely LTEs or rocks with no EEZ? Then it wouldn’t really matter who owned them; they would all fall within the Philippines’ EEZ that is reckoned from the Luzon and Palawan coastlines, which are undisputedly ours.