Human
Rights Watch Catalogues Israeli War Crimes In Lebanon
By Rick Kelly
04 August 2006
World
Socialist Web
The
US-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) accused Israel of committing war crimes
in a 50-page report released yesterday. Titled “Fatal Strikes:
Israel’s indiscriminate attacks against civilians in Lebanon”,
the report provided additional proof that the Zionist state is deliberately
targeting civilians as part of its criminal strategy to terrorise and
drive out the population of southern Lebanon.
“The pattern of attacks
during the Israeli offensive in Lebanon suggests that the failures [to
distinguish between combatants and civilians] cannot be explained or
dismissed as mere accidents,” the report explained. “[T]he
extent of the pattern and seriousness of the consequences indicate the
commission of war crimes.”
HRW called on United Nations
secretary general Kofi Annan to establish an International Commission
of Inquiry to investigate Israel’s war crimes and to “formulate
recommendations with a view to holding accountable those who violated
the law”.
The report also produced
further evidence that the Israeli military has systematically covered
up and lied about its attacks on Lebanese civilians. “Human Rights
Watch found no cases in which Hezbollah deliberately used civilians
as shields to protect them from retaliatory IDF [Israeli Defence Force]
attack,” it stated, contradicting Israeli claims. “In none
of the cases of civilian deaths documented in this report is there evidence
to suggest that Hezbollah forces or weapons were in or near the area
that the IDF targeted during or just prior to the attack.”
These conclusions were drawn
from extensive on-the-ground investigations by HRW staff in Lebanon.
Researchers conducted interviews with victims and witnesses of Israeli
attacks, and corroborated these reports with their own inspections of
attack sites, and information from hospitals, humanitarian groups and
government bodies. This process was conducted for a selection of Israeli
missile and artillery strikes that killed a total of 153 civilians—more
than one-third of the total reported Lebanese deaths in the first two
weeks of the war.
One section of the report
dealt with the July 30 massacre in the southern Lebanese town of Qana.
According to the organisation, initial estimates that almost 60 civilians
had been killed in an Israeli air strike on a residential building underestimated
the number of people who managed to escape from beneath the collapsed
building. They put the total dead at 28, including 16 children, although
this number may rise, as 13 people who remain missing may still be buried
under the rubble.
Survivors angrily denied
Israeli allegations that Hezbollah rockets had been fired from the area
and that local residents had been used as “civilian shields”
by militants. “If they [the Israelis] really saw the rocket launcher,
where did it go?” Muhammed Mahmoud Shalhoub, a 61-year-old farmer
who escaped the bombed building, told HRW. “We show Israel our
dead, why don’t they show us the rocket launchers?” Another
resident, Ghazi Aydaji, added: “If Hezbollah was firing near the
house, would a family of over 50 people just sit there?”
Apart from survivors and
Qana residents, HRW interviewed dozens of journalists, rescue workers,
and international observers. No one reported seeing any evidence of
a Hezbollah military presence in the destroyed building or anywhere
in Qana.
None of this damning evidence
prevented the Israeli military from yesterday announcing that its internal
investigation concluded that the building had been targeted “in
accordance with the military’s guidelines regarding the use of
fire against suspicious structures inside villages whose residents have
been warned to evacuate, and which were adjacent to areas from where
rockets are fired towards Israel”. IDF Chief of Staff Lieutenant
General Dan Halutz again accused Hezbollah of using civilians as defensive
shields, and claimed that the attack would not have proceeded had Israel
known civilians were in the building.
The report disproved all
these lies. Far from being an aberration or mistake, the atrocity in
Qana was only the worst known incident in Israel’s deliberate
targeting of civilian areas.
In the first two weeks of
Israel’s offensive, about 5,000 civilian homes were destroyed
or damaged by air strikes. “Israel has caused large-scale civilian
casualties by striking civilian homes, with no apparent military objective
either inside the home or in the vicinity,” the report stated.
“In some cases, warplanes returned to strike again while residents
and neighbours had gathered around the house to remove the dead and
assist the wounded.”
HRW provided detailed accounts
of a number of attacks. In one case, Israeli warplanes and Apache helicopters
launched a sustained bombardment of the southern Lebanese village of
Srifa on July 19. “After the first bombing, villagers started
fleeing to neighbouring villages for safety,” one resident reported.
“Israel saw this from their drones, and they sent Apache helicopters
to circle the village to prevent us from leaving. They started shelling
the area around the village from airplanes.”
About three Israeli fighter
jets then hit at least 13 homes, collapsing the buildings on the basements
underneath, which were packed with residents. Between 26 and 42 civilians
are believed to have been killed in the attack. The exact number remains
unknown, as rescue workers have been unable to reach the village to
recover the bodies, and Israeli warplanes and helicopters have prevented
local residents from clearing the debris themselves. HRW researchers
found no evidence of Hezbollah military activity in the area, confirming
surviving residents’ reports that no rockets had been fired from
the village.
The report also detailed
numerous Israeli attacks on civilians fleeing southern Lebanon. On some
days, precision missiles hit dozen of civilian cars. In one of the worst
incidents yet documented, 21 civilians were killed on July 15 when an
Israeli strike hit a convoy of villagers fleeing the Lebanese border
village of Marwahin. After receiving an evacuation order from the IDF,
the villagers sought refuge at a nearby UNIFIL (United Nations Interim
Force in Lebanon) position. After being turned away, they drove north
in a convoy of vehicles. Israeli helicopters then bombed two vehicles,
killing 21 people, including 14 children and two pregnant women. None
of the civilians were armed or in any way connected with Hezbollah.
Israel has also targeted
medical personnel and aid convoys. In Qana, seven days before the massacre
of at least 28 civilians, fighter jets hit two ambulances in the town
as they were transferring three wounded civilians from one vehicle to
another. “A weapon directly hit one ambulance, and a second attack
struck the second ambulance a few minutes later,” the report stated.
“All six of the Red Cross workers were injured during the attack,
and the three patients they were treating suffered additional injuries.
One of the patients, a middle-aged man, lost his leg in the ambulance
strike, while his elderly mother was partially paralyzed. The third
patient, a young boy, received multiple shrapnel wounds to the head.”
HRW also condemned Israel’s
use of cluster munitions, which have a terrible record of causing civilian
casualties. The organisation is continuing to investigate Israel’s
destruction of Lebanese infrastructure such as electricity grids, roads,
and airports, and is also examining allegations of Israeli use of white
phosphorous in Lebanon. White phosphorous is a chemical originally intended
to illuminate battlefields. When used against people, however, it burns
through clothing and skin, causing horrific injuries and deaths.
The litany of war crimes
catalogued in the report provide overwhelming evidence that the Israeli
offensive in Lebanon has nothing to do with fighting “terrorism”
or with recovering the two IDF soldiers captured by Hezbollah last month.
The assault is the culmination of years of military and political strategic
planning within Israel, aimed at reducing Lebanon to the status of a
degraded protectorate of the Zionist state, and crushing all anti-Israeli
resistance in the country. The murder of hundreds of civilians and the
creation of nearly a million Lebanese refugees is a central and necessary
component of this criminal strategy.
HRW deals with none of these
critical political issues, and makes no attempt to explain why Israel
is murdering so many civilians. In the report’s recommendations,
it appeals to the Israeli government to uphold international law and
cease its indiscriminate attacks on civilians. It also calls on the
Bush administration to suspend its weapons supply to Israel and to hold
an investigation into how US-provided arms have been deployed in Lebanon.
Such appeals will fall on
deaf ears and are entirely futile. The government of Prime Minister
Ehud Olmert has made clear that it does not regard international law
as being in any way applicable to Israel, and senior cabinet members
have issued statements describing every civilian remaining in southern
Lebanon as a legitimate target. The Bush administration’s contempt
for precepts of international law is well documented—from detention
without trial at Guantánamo Bay to the invasion of Iraq. In the
present crisis, Washington has actively encouraged Tel Aviv in its criminal
assault on Lebanon in order to forge what Condoleezza Rice has described
as a “new Middle East”.