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Rights group: IDF indiscriminately struck Lebanon civilians

AP
Posted on Thursday September 6, 2007

In its harshest condemnation of Israel since the Second Lebanon War, Human Rights Watch charged that most of the Lebanese civilian casualties came from indiscriminate Israeli air strikes, according to a report to released Thursday.

Presenting the group’s findings at a news conference, Human Rights Watch executive director Kenneth Roth said there were only rare cases of Hezbollah operating in civilian villages.

“To the contrary, once the war started, most Hezbollah military officials and even many political officials left the villages,” he said. And indeed what we found is that most Hezbollah military activity was conducted from prepared positions outside Lebanese villages in the hills and valleys around.”

Israel has said that it attacked civilian areas because Hezbollah set up rocket launchers in villages and towns.

More than 1,000 Lebanese were killed in the 34-day conflict last summer, which began after Hezbollah staged a cross-border raid, killing three Israel Defense Forces soldiers and capturing two others, Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev. They are still being held.

Israel Air Force warplanes targeted Lebanese infrastructure, including bridges and Beirut Airport, and heavily damaged a neighborhood in Beirut known as a Hezbollah stronghold, as well as attacking Hezbollah centers in villages near the border. Hezbollah fired nearly 4,000 rockets at northern Israel, killing 44 civilians. In the fighting, 119 Israeli soldiers were killed.

Roth said a in the statement issued before the report’s release that, “Israel wrongfully acted as if all civilians had heeded its warnings to evacuate southern Lebanon when it knew they had not, disregarding its continuing legal duty to distinguish between military targets and civilians.”

He added, “Issuing warnings doesn’t make indiscriminate attacks lawful.”

Foreign Ministry spokesman Mark Regev rejected the report’s findings. “Hezbollah adopted a deliberate strategy of shielding itself behind the civilian population and turning the civilians in Lebanon into a human shield,” he said, charging that Hezbollah broke the first fundamental rule of war in that they deliberately exploited the civilian population of Lebanon as a human shield.

The full report was released at a news conference in Jerusalem on Thursday. Human Rights Watch had to cancel a similar news conference in Beirut last month because of threats of Hezbollah protests. That report accused Hezbollah of firing rockets indiscriminately at civilian areas in Israel.

Human Rights Watch said it investigated 94 cases of Israeli air, artillery and ground attacks to discern the circumstances surrounding the deaths of 510 civilians and 51 combatants, about half the death toll in Lebanon in the conflict.

The group said simple movement of vehicles or people, such as attempting to buy bread or moving around private homes, could trigger a deadly Israeli attack. The group charged that Israeli aircraft targeted vehicles carrying fleeing civilians.

Roth said that Hezbollah guerrillas did not wear uniforms, making it hard to pick them out from civilians, but that did not justify the Israeli military’s failure to distinguish between them. He said the laws of war dictate if in doubt to treat the person as a civilian.

The report said the investigation refutes the argument made by Israeli officials that most of the Lebanese civilian casualties were due to Hezbollah routinely hiding among civilians. It said Hezbollah did at times fire rockets from, and store weapons in, populated areas and deploy its forces among the civilian population.

However, the human rights group said it found no evidence in these cases of separate legal violation of shielding, which is the deliberate use of civilians to render combatants immune from attack. Also, it said, Hezbollah conducted most of its activities and stored most of its weapons away from civilians.

Regev said there were countless documented examples of civilian facilities being used for military purposes – missiles in houses, mosques and schools used for storing weapons.

The report found that Hezbollah used hilltop UN positions for shelling Israel, which it said might be shielding, but said that required further investigation.