Amnesty International: Hezbollah Committed War Crimes
Three weeks after accusing Israel of human rights violations in the war in Lebanon, Amnesty International released another report focusing on Hezbollah’s behavior during the war. Amnesty’s conclusion: Hezbollah’s indiscrimate attacks on Israelis constitute war crimes.
Directing attacks at civilians or civilian objects is a violation of international humanitarian law, and doing so with intent constitutes a war crime.
Indiscriminate attacks too contravene the principle of distinction and are also a war crime. Indiscriminate attacks include those that involve a method or means of combat that cannot be directed at specific military objectives and are therefore “of a nature to strike military objectives and civilians or civilian objects without distinction.”
The report, however, leaves out any examination of Hezbollah’s war crimes against the Lebanese people such as using Lebanese civilians as human shields, firing rockets at Israel from populated areas, hiding weapons in private homes, sometimes without the homeowners’ permission, and impeding Lebanese civilians from leaving areas under Israeli attack.
In an analysis of Amnesty’s earlier report on Israel, NGO Monitor noted the same ommission in Amnesty’s listing of war damage on the Lebanese side.
The authors of this report do not consider or seek to verify claims that these buildings were used to launch attacks against Israel - there is not a single mention of the street fighting in Beit Jabal in when Amnesty describes the building destructions in that area.[1] The report also does not delve into the complex dilemmas created when civilian infrastructure becomes a legitimate military target due to its use in terror attacks. As Michael Erlich has pointed out, Amnesty brazenly assumes that all civilian casualties are the product of war crimes.[2] Furthermore the report confuses the issues by grouping damage to infrastructure and civilian deaths together, as possible “war crimes”. The former is clearly permissible in war while the latter requires independent investigation, depending on the circumstances.
