Nearly All the War Crimes Were Israel's
The Second Lebanon War, A Year Later
By Jonathan Cook
CounterPunch, August 16, 2007
This week marks a year since the end of hostilities now
officially called the Second Lebanon war by Israelis. A month of
fighting -- mostly Israeli aerial bombardment of Lebanon, and rocket
attacks from the Shia militia Hizbullah on northern Israel in
response -- ended with more than 1,000 Lebanese civilians and a
small but unknown number of Hizbullah fighters dead, as well as 119
Israeli soldiers and 43 civilians.
When Israel and the United States realised that Hizbullah could not
be bombed into submission, they pushed a resolution, 1701, through
the United Nations. It placed an expanded international peacekeeping
force, UNIFIL, in south Lebanon to keep Hizbullah in check and try
to disarm its few thousand fighters.
But many significant developments since the war have gone unnoticed,
including several that seriously put in question Israel's account of
what happened last summer. This is old ground worth revisiting for
that reason alone.
The war began on 12 July, when Israel launched waves of air strikes
on Lebanon after Hizbullah killed three soldiers and captured two
more on the northern border. (A further five troops were killed by a
land mine when their tank crossed into Lebanon in hot pursuit.)
Hizbullah had long been warning that it would seize soldiers if it
had the chance, in an effort to push Israel into a prisoner
exchange. Israel has been holding a handful of Lebanese prisoners
since it withdrew from its two-decade occupation of south Lebanon in
2000.
The Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, who has been widely blamed
for the army's failure to subdue Hizbullah, appointed the Winograd
Committee to investigate what went wrong. So far Winograd has been
long on pointing out the country's military and political failures
and short on explaining how the mistakes were made or who made them.
Olmert is still in power, even if hugely unpopular.
In the meantime, there is every indication that Israel is planning
another round of fighting against Hizbullah after it has "learnt the
lessons" from the last war. The new defence minister, Ehud Barak,
who was responsible for the 2000 withdrawal, has made it a priority
to develop anti-missile systems such as "Iron Dome" to neutralise
the rocket threat from Hizbullah, using some of the recently
announced $30 billion of American military aid.
It has been left to the Israeli media to begin rewriting the history
of last summer. Last weekend, an editorial in the liberal Haaretz
newspaper went so far as to admit that this was "a war initiated by
Israel against a relatively small guerrilla group". Israel's
supporters, including high-profile defenders like Alan Dershowitz in
the US who claimed that Israel had no choice but to bomb Lebanon,
must have been squirming in their seats.
There are several reasons why Ha'aretz may have reached this new
assessment.
Recent reports have revealed that one of the main justifications for
Hizbullah's continuing resistance -- that Israel failed to withdraw
fully from Lebanese territory in 2000 -- is now supported by the UN.
Last month its cartographers quietly admitted that Lebanon is right
in claiming sovereignty over a small fertile area known as the
Shebaa Farms, still occupied by Israel. Israel argues that the
territory is Syrian and will be returned in future peace talks with
Damascus, even though Syria backs Lebanon's position. The UN's
admission has been mostly ignored by the international media.
One of Israel's main claims during the war was that it made every
effort to protect Lebanese civilians from its aerial bombardments.
The casualty figures suggested otherwise, but increasingly so too
does other evidence.
A shocking aspect of the war was Israel's firing of at least a
million cluster bombs, old munitions supplied by the US with a
failure rate as high as 50 per cent, in the last days of fighting.
The tiny bomblets, effectively small land mines, were left littering
south Lebanon after the UN-brokered ceasefire, and are reported so
far to have killed 30 civilians and wounded at least another 180.
Israeli commanders have admitted firing 1.2 million such bomblets,
while the UN puts the figure closer to 3 million.
At the time, it looked suspiciously as if Israel had taken the brief
opportunity before the war's end to make south Lebanon -- the
heartland of both the country's Shia population and its militia,
Hizbullah -- uninhabitable, and to prevent the return of hundreds of
thousands of Shia who had fled Israel's earlier bombing campaigns.
Israel's use of cluster bombs has been described as a war crime by
human rights organisations. According to the rules set by Israel's
then chief of staff, Dan Halutz, the bombs should have been used
only in open and unpopulated areas -- although with such a high
failure rate, this would have done little to prevent later civilian
casualties.
After the war, the army ordered an investigation, mainly to placate
Washington, which was concerned at the widely reported fact that it
had supplied the munitions. The findings, which should have been
published months ago, have yet to be made public.
The delay is not surprising. An initial report by the army, leaked
to the Israeli media, discovered that the cluster bombs had been
fired into Lebanese population centres in gross violation of
international law. The order was apparently given by the head of the
Northern Command at the time, Udi Adam. A US State Department
investigation reached a similar conclusion.
Another claim, one that Israel hoped might justify the large number
of Lebanese civilians it killed during the war, was that Hizbullah
fighters had been regularly hiding and firing rockets from among
south Lebanon's civilian population. Human rights groups found scant
evidence of this, but a senior UN official, Jan Egeland, offered
succour by accusing Hizbullah of "cowardly blending".
There were always strong reasons for suspecting the Israeli claim to
be untrue. Hizbullah had invested much effort in developing an
elaborate system of tunnels and underground bunkers in the
countryside, which Israel knew little about, in which it hid its
rockets and from which fighters attacked Israeli soldiers as they
tried to launch a ground invasion. Also, common sense suggests that
Hizbullah fighters would have been unwilling to put their families,
who live in south Lebanon's villages, in danger by launching rockets
from among them.
Now Israeli front pages are carrying reports from Israeli military
sources that put in serious doubt Israel's claims.
Since the war's end Hizbullah has apparently relocated most of its
rockets to conceal them from the UN peacekeepers, who have been
carrying out extensive searches of south Lebanon to disarm Hizbullah
under the terms of Resolution 1701. According to the UNIFIL, some 33
of these underground bunkers or more than 90 per cent -- have been
located and Hizbullah weapons discovered there, including rockets
and launchers, destroyed.
The Israeli media has noted that the Israeli army calls these sites
"nature reserves"; similarly, the UN has made no mention of finding
urban-based Hizbullah bunkers. Relying on military sources, Haaretz
reported last month: "Most of the rockets fired against Israel
during the war last year were launched from the 'nature reserves'."
In short, even Israel is no longer claiming that Hizbullah was
firing its rockets from among civilians.
According to the UN report, Hizbullah has moved the rockets out of
the underground bunkers and abandoned its rural launch pads. Most
rockets, it is believed, have gone north of the Litani River, beyond
the range of the UN monitors. But some, according to the Israeli
army, may have been moved into nearby Shia villages to hide them
from the UN.
As a result, Haaretz noted that Israeli commanders had issued a
warning to Lebanon that in future hostilities the army "will not
hesitate to bomb -- and even totally destroy -- urban areas after it
gives Lebanese civilians the chance to flee". How this would diverge
from Israel's policy during the war, when Hizbullah was based in its
"nature reserves" but Lebanese civilians were still bombed in their
towns and villages, was not made clear.
If the Israeli army's new claims are true (unlike the old ones),
Hizbullah's movement of some of its rockets into villages should be
condemned. But not by Israel, whose army is breaking international
law by concealing its weapons in civilian areas on a far grander
scale.
As a first-hand observer of the fighting from Israel's side of the
border last year, I noted on several occasions that Israel had built
many of its permanent military installations, including weapons
factories and army camps, and set up temporary artillery positions
next to -- and in some cases inside -- civilian communities in the
north of Israel.
Many of those communities are Arab: Arab citizens constitute about
half of the Galilee's population. Locating military bases next to
these communities was a particularly reckless act by the army as
Arab towns and villages lack the public shelters and air raid
warning systems available in Jewish communities. Eighteen of the 43
Israeli civilians killed were Arab -- a proportion that surprised
many Israeli Jews, who assumed that Hizbullah would not want to
target Arab communities.
In many cases it is still not possible to specify where Hizbullah
rockets landed because Israel's military censor prevents any
discussion that might identify the location of a military site.
During the war Israel used this to advantageous effect: for example,
it was widely reported that a Hizbullah rocket fell close to a
hospital but reporters failed to mention that a large army camp was
next to it. An actual strike against the camp could have been
described in the very same terms.
It seems likely that Hizbullah, which had flown pilotless spy drones
over Israel earlier in the year, similar to Israel's own aerial
spying missions, knew where many of these military bases were. The
question is, was Hizbullah trying to hit them or -- as most
observers claimed, following Israel's lead -- was it actually more
interested in killing civilians.
A full answer may never be possible, as we cannot know Hizbullah's
intentions -- as opposed to the consequences of its actions -- any
more than we can discern Israel's during the war.
Human Rights Watch, however, has argued that, because Hizbullah's
basic rockets were not precise, every time they were fired into
Israel they were effectively targeted at civilians. Hizbullah was
therefore guilty of war crimes in using its rockets, whatever the
intention of the launch teams. In other words, according to this
reading of international law, only Israel had the right to fire
missiles and drop bombs because its military hardware is more
sophisticated -- and, of course, more deadly.
Nonetheless, new evidence suggests strongly that, whether or not
Hizbullah had the right to use its rockets, it may often have been
trying to hit military targets, even if it rarely succeeded. The
Arab Association for Human Rights, based in Nazareth, has been
compiling a report on the Hizbullah rocket strikes against Arab
communities in the north since last summer. It is not sure whether
it will ever be able to publish its findings because of the military
censorship laws.
But the information currently available makes for interesting
reading. The Association has looked at northern Arab communities hit
by Hizbullah rockets, often repeatedly, and found that in every case
there was at least one military base or artillery battery placed
next to, or in a few cases inside, the community. In some
communities there were several such sites.
This does not prove that Hizbullah wanted only to hit military
bases, of course. But it does indicate that in some cases it was
clearly trying to, even if it lacked the technical resources to be
sure of doing so. It also suggests that, in terms of international
law, Hizbullah behaved no worse, and probably far better, than
Israel during the war.
The evidence so far indicates that Israel:
* established legitimate grounds for Hizbullah's attack on the
border post by refusing to withdraw from the Lebanese territory of
the Shebaa Farms in 2000;
* initiated a war of aggression by refusing to engage in talks about
a prisoner swap offered by Hizbullah;
* committed a grave war crime by intentionally using cluster bombs
against south Lebanon's civilians;
* repeatedly hit Lebanese communities, killing many civilians, even
though the evidence is that no Hizbullah fighters were to be found
there;
* and put its own civilians, especially Arab civilians, in great
danger by making their communities targets for Hizbullah attacks and
failing to protect them.
It is clear that during the Second Lebanon war Israel committed the
most serious war crimes.
