When confronted with the scale of the carnage wrought upon the civilians and civilian infrastructure of southern Lebanon last year, the Israeli government and its apologists typically resort to the following line: ‘we had to do it, because Hizbullah kept hiding behind civilians’ (it should be noted here that Israel is in no moral position whatsoever to complain about other people using human shields). “Hiding behind civilians” – this became the standard media narrative for explaining how the Hizbullah’s tactics placed Israel in a difficult position with regards to killing civilians, which surely represents a significant success for the Israeli propaganda machine.
Of course, a far less popular topic for discussion was the fact that Israel “hid behind civilians” during that war, placing military bases and military equipment near and amongst civilian settlements. Independent journalist Jonathan Cook reported at the time how journalists in Israel during the war were subjected to strict censorship laws (or “martial law”, as he put it) that forbade them from disclosing the locations of Israel’s military installations. That silence allowed the Israeli government to propagate the myth that every Hizbullah attack was deliberately targeted at civilians, when in fact many were aimed at military targets that were close to or embedded within civilian settlements.
In any event, Human Rights Watch investigated Israel’s claims last year and found them to be nonsense. In an extensive report entitled ‘Fatal Strikes: Israel’s Indiscriminate Attacks Against Civilians in Lebanon‘, it explained,
“The Israeli government claims that it targets only Hezbollah, and that fighters from the group are using civilians as human shields, thereby placing them at risk. Human Rights Watch found no cases in which Hezbollah deliberately used civilians as shields to protect them from retaliatory IDF attack. Hezbollah occasionally did store weapons in or near civilian homes and fighters placed rocket launchers within populated areas or near U.N. observers, which are serious violations of the laws of war because they violate the duty to take all feasible precautions to avoid civilian casualties. However, those cases do not justify the IDF’s extensive use of indiscriminate force which has cost so many civilian lives. 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.”
This was based upon an on-the-ground investigation of 153 civilian deaths, or over a third of the reported deaths at the time. HRW concluded:
“By consistently failing to distinguish between combatants and civilians, Israel has violated one of the most fundamental tenets of the laws of war: the duty to carry out attacks on only military targets. The pattern of attacks during the Israeli offensive in Lebanon suggests that the failures cannot be explained or dismissed as mere accidents; the extent of the pattern and the seriousness of the consequences indicate the commission of war crimes.”
Amnesty International reached a similar judgement:
“In the course of the conflict Israeli forces committed serious violations of international human rights and humanitarian law, including war crimes. In particular, Israeli forces carried out indiscriminate and disproportionate attacks on a large scale. Israeli forces also appear to have carried out direct attacks on civilian infrastructure intended to inflict a form of collective punishment on Lebanon’s people, in order to induce them and the Lebanese government to turn against Hizbullah, as well as to cause harm to Hizbullah’s military capability”.
This did not deter pro-Israel propagandists (who are, it seems, undeterrable), who simply continued to use the ‘hiding behind civilians’ line regardless, but Human Rights Watch today published another report emphasising once again that “Israel’s indiscriminate airstrikes, not Hezbollah’s shielding as claimed by Israeli officials, caused most of the approximately 900 civilian deaths” during the war. From the report:
“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…
Statements by Israeli officials strongly suggest that the IDF deliberately hit entire neighborhoods because they were seen as pro-Hezbollah, rather than specific Hezbollah military targets as required by the laws of war…
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…
With these few exceptions, Human Rights Watch found that Hezbollah stored its rockets in bunkers and facilities located in uninhabited fields and valleys; ordered its fighters and civilian officials away from populated civilian areas as soon as the fighting started; and fired its rockets from pre-prepared positions outside villages. In the vast majority of airstrikes resulting in civilian deaths investigated by Human Rights Watch, there was no Hezbollah military presence or activity to justify the attack.” [my emphasis]
The report is the result of a five month investigation that examined 561 deaths (510 of them civilian), or almost half of the total death toll. Once again, a clear picture emerges: the vast majority of civilian deaths and the extensive damage to civilian infrastructure was a result not of Hizbullah “hiding among civilians” but of an Israeli campaign to deliberately destroy civilian infrastructure as a form of collective punishment, together with systematic failure by the IDF to distinguish between civilians and combatants.
This should be front-page news in Britain and the United States, both of whom backed Israeli war crimes in Lebanon to the hilt. The U.S. sent Israel weapons during the conflict, via British military airports, and both countries conspired to delay a ceasefire to give Israel more time to “bomb Lebanon back 20 years”. During the war, the U.S. House of Representatives almost unanimously passed a resolution declaring unqualified support for Israeli crimes. Some choice passages:
‘Resolved,; That the House of Representatives–
(2) condemns Hamas and Hezbollah for engaging in unprovoked and reprehensible armed attacks against Israel on undisputed Israeli territory, for taking hostages, for killing Israeli soldiers, and for continuing to indiscriminately target Israeli civilian populations with their rockets and missiles;
(3) further condemns Hamas and Hezbollah for cynically exploiting civilian populations as shields, locating their equipment and bases of operation, including their rockets and other armaments, amidst civilian populations, including in homes and mosques;
(4) recognizes Israel’s longstanding commitment to minimizing civilian loss and welcomes Israel’s continued efforts to prevent civilian casualties;
I bet they’re fucking cringing at those words now – although actually, the sad truth is that they probably aren’t. ‘Are you still talking about those stupid brown people? Get over it already!’
The report has particular relevance in the light of stories that Israel is planning to cut off water, electricity and gas supplies to the Gaza Strip in an effort to turn the population against Hamas. As Vice Premier Haim Ramon (the former “Justice Minister”, no less) explained, “[w]e will set a price tag for every Qassam, in terms of cutting off infrastructures”. In other words, Israel is once again preparing to inflict collective punishment upon a defenceless, desperate people. This would hardly be a new experience for Gazans – last year, for example, Israeli jets destroyed Gaza’s power plant in what the Israeli human rights organisation B’Tselem termed a “war crime”. John Dugard, the UN special rapporteur for human rights in the Occupied Territories, reported how, even before last year’s ‘Operation Summer Rains’ (in which hundreds of Palestinians, most of them civilians, were killed) began,
“[i]t seemed clear to me that the Government of Israel had embarked upon a siege [of Gaza] in order to bring about regime change. In the process little attention was being paid to human rights, as shelling and sonic booms violated the fundamental rights to life and human dignity, and even less attention was paid to the constraints of international humanitarian law; it was already clear that collective punishment was to be the instrument used to bring about regime change.”
Today’s Ha’aretz editorial got it right when it described Ramon’s proposal for Gaza as “immoral and illegal” but, as Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and others have shown, it’s just the latest example of a long-running Israeli strategy.
Cross-posted at The Heathlander