HRW: Israeli Policies Contributing to the Civilian Death Toll

Israeli Policies Contributing to the Civilian Death Toll

In the vast majority of cases documented in this report, Israeli air strikes hit near or on civilian objects, killing numerous civilians in their homes or vehicles. While there were instances in which civilian deaths were “collateral damage” from legitimate attacks on military targets, during the vast majority of the deadly air strikes we investigated, we found no evidence of Hezbollah military presence, weaponry or any other military objective that would have justified the strike. Human Rights Watch visits to the graveyards in the villages found that the victims of these strikes were buried as civilians, and not honored as “fighters” or “martyrs” by Hezbollah or other militant groups, despite the pride that Hezbollah takes in these labels. Women and children account for a large majority of the victims of Israeli air strikes that we documented. Out of the 499 Lebanese civilian casualties of whom Human Rights Watch was able to confirm the age and gender, 302 were women or children.

This repeated failure to distinguish between civilians and combatants cannot be explained as mere mismanagement of the war or a collection of mistakes. Our case studies show that Israeli policy was primarily responsible for this deadly failure. Israel assumed that all Lebanese civilians had observed its warnings to evacuate villages south of the Litani River, and thus that anyone who remained was a combatant. Reflecting that assumption, it labeled any visible person, or movement of persons or vehicles south of the Litani River or in the Beka` Valley as a Hezbollah military operation which could be targeted. Similarly, it carried out widespread bombardment of southern Lebanon, including the massive use of cluster munitions prior to the expected ceasefire, in a manner that did not discriminate between military objectives and civilians.

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Compounding the problem, Israel targeted people or structures associated in any way with Hezbollah’s military, political, or social structures—regardless of whether they constituted valid military objectives in accordance with international humanitarian law—and failed to take all necessary precautions to avoid civilian casualties when attacking suspected Hezbollah targets.

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Hezbollah Conduct During the War

Our research in Lebanon documented a number of cases in which Hezbollah fighters placed weapons or ammunition inside civilian homes or villages, as well as some cases in which Hezbollah fighters fired rockets from densely populated areas.¹³ (Illustrative examples are detailed below.) Such conduct violates at minimum the legal duty to take all feasible precautions to avoid civilian casualties. Where Hezbollah combatants intended to use civilians to shield military assets from attack, the requisite criminal intent would be present for the war crime of shielding. However, as already noted, such practices were not nearly as widespread as official Israeli government accounts and some independent press accounts have suggested, and our research found that in all but a few of the cases of civilian deaths we investigated, Hezbollah fighters had not mixed with the civilian population or taken other actions to contribute to the targeting of a particular home or vehicle by Israeli forces.

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Summary of Methodology and Errors Corrected

This report builds on Human Rights Watch’s August 2006 report, Fatal Strikes: Israel’s Indiscriminate Attacks Against Civilians in Lebanon. It represents the most comprehensive study of civilian deaths in Lebanon to date, based on extensive on-the-ground research. During the course of five months of continuous research in Lebanon and Israel, Human Rights Watch investigated the deaths of more than 561 persons during Israeli air and groundstrikes and collected additional summary information about an additional 548 deaths, thus accounting for a total number of 1,109 deaths (civilians and combatants) from the 34-day conflict. Human Rights Watch interviewed more than 355 victims and witnesses of attacks in one-on-one settings and collected information from hospitals, humanitarian groups, journalists, military experts, and government agencies. We visited more than fifty villages and conducted on-site inspections. Human Rights Watch also conducted research in Israel, inspecting the IDF’s use of weapons and discussing the conduct of forces with IDF officials.