Why They Died

The latest Human Rights Report offers a chilling reading on how more than one thousand Lebanese civilians died in Israel’s July war. It also rebukes one of Israel’s loudest sound-bites, namely the argument that Hezbollah used women and Children as human shields.

The investigation took 5 months, in which Human Rights Watch visited more than 50 Lebanese villages and interviewed 316 victims and eyewitnesses, as well as 39 military experts, journalists and Israeli, Lebanese government and Hezbollah officials.

Below is an excerpt from the press release they emailed me. (Interestingly, they did not email me the press release of the first Hezbollah report which caused a big outrage in Lebanon)

Human Rights Watch’s on-the-ground investigation refutes the argument made by Israeli officials that most of the Lebanese civilian casualties were due to Hezbollah routinely hiding among civilians and using them as “human shields” in the fighting. Hezbollah at times did fire rockets from, and store weapons in, populated areas and deploy its forces among the civilian population. That violated its legal duty to take all feasible precautions to spare civilians the hazards of armed conflict. In a few cases documented by Human Rights Watch, these Hezbollah violations led to civilian deaths. However, in contrast to this unlawful endangering of civilians, Human Rights Watch found no evidence in these cases of the separate legal violation of shielding, which is the deliberate use of civilians to render combatants immune from attack. The various film clips and photos published by the IDF and its allies do not provide that evidence.

Human Rights Watch found that a simple movement of vehicles or persons — such as attempting to buy bread or moving about private homes — could be enough to cause a deadly Israeli airstrike that would kill civilians. Israeli warplanes also targeted moving vehicles that turned out to be carrying only civilians trying to flee the conflict. In most such cases documented in the report, there is no evidence of a Hezbollah military presence that would have justified the attack.

The report makes the following main recommendations:

· Israel should revise its military policies that effectively treat all persons remaining in an area following evacuation warnings as combatants, so that in the future it targets only people or structures that constitute valid military objectives under the laws of war. Israel’s Winograd Commission, in particular, should investigate this issue.

· Hezbollah should take all feasible measures to ensure that Hezbollah forces do not place civilians or UN personnel at unnecessary risk by deploying in, firing from or storing weapons in populated areas. The Lebanese government should investigate these practices. (Human Rights Watch’s report on Hezbollah’s deliberate and indiscriminate rocket attacks on civilian areas of Israel also calls for the Lebanese government to investigate those practices: http://hrw.org/english/docs/2007/08/30/lebano16740.htm).

· The United States should investigate Israel’s use of US-supplied arms in violation of the laws of war and suspend the transfer of those arms that have been used unlawfully, as well as funding or support for such materiel, pending certification by the US State Department that Israel has stopped using such arms in violation of the law and has changed the military doctrine behind that misuse.

· Syria and Iran should not transfer to Hezbollah any material, including rockets, which Hezbollah has used in violation of the laws of war, until Hezbollah commits that it will not use them as such and in fact ceases such use.

· The secretary-general of the United Nations should establish an international commission of inquiry to investigate reports of violations of the laws of war by all parties to the conflict, including possible war crimes.

In case you wish to download the entire 237 pages report, click here.
You can also download the previous report: “Civilians under Assault, Hezbollah’s Rocket Attacks on Israel in the 2006 War”