“What happened in the Dahiya quarter of Beirut in 2006 will happen in every village from which Israel is fired on …
“We will apply disproportionate force on it [the village] and cause great damage and destruction there. From our standpoint, these are not civilian villages, they are military bases…
“This is not a recommendation. This is a plan. And it has been approved”.
That was IDF Northern Command chief Gabi Eisenkot, openly threatening to kill Lebanese civilians and destroy entire villages yesterday in Israel’s leading daily paper. Eisenkot calls this the “Dahiya doctrine“, after the poor, densely populated Shi’a suburb of Beirut that Israel flattened in 2006, killing or displacing almost the entire population. Human Rights Watch condemned the “massive destruction” that was inflicted on Dahiya as “both indiscriminate and disproportionate”, describing how “Israeli forces attacked not only Hezbollah military targets but also the offices of Hezbollah’s charitable organizations, the offices of its parliamentarians, its research center, and multi-story residential apartment buildings in areas considered supportive of Hezbollah.”
This is what the IDF has in store for the people of Lebanon.
In promising “disproportionate force” against whole villages, Eisenkot is threatening a war crime (.pdf):
“Direct attacks against civilian objects are prohibited, as are indiscriminate attacks. Indiscriminate attacks are those which strike military objectives and civilian objects without distinction. One form of indiscriminate attack is treating clearly separate and distinct military objects located in a city, town, village or concentration of civilians, as a single military objective. If two buildings in a residential area are identified as containing fighters, bombardment of the entire area would be unlawful.
Disproportionate attacks, also prohibited, are those in which the “collateral damage” would be regarded as excessive in relation to the direct military advantage to be gained.”
Incidentally, the Reuters article linked above (oh, alright) reporting the General’s remarks asserts that Israel’s accusation that Hizbullah launched rockets from civilian homes during the war was “echoed by human rights groups who also accused Israel of using excessive force that claimed the lives of innocent civilians.”
This is a quite remarkable distortion. In fact, Human Rights Watch conducted an extensive study of this particular allegation and discovered it to be an almost complete fabrication. While Hizbullah “at times” failed to “take all feasible precautions to avoid firing rockets from populated areas”, HRW “did not find evidence … that the deployment of Hezbollah forces in Lebanon routinely or widely violated the laws of war”. Hizbullah did not “routinely [locate] its rockets inside or near civilian homes” (in fact it “stored most of its rockets … in uninhabited fields and valleys”) and nor, barring a few exceptions, did it “[fire] its rockets from populated areas”. Quite the contrary:
“The available evidence indicates that in the vast majority of cases Hezbollah fighters left populated civilian areas as soon as the fighting started and fired the majority of their rockets from pre-prepared positions in largely unpopulated valleys and fields outside villages.”
Finally, Reuters might recall that human rights organisations did not accuse Israel merely of employing ‘excessive force’. Rather, they accused Israel of “serious violations of international humanitarian law“, “reckless indifference to the fate of Lebanese civilians” and “war crimes” (.pdf).
Cross-posted at The Heathlander