Attacks on Civilian Homes
Since July 12, when Hezbollah launched an attack on Israeli positions initially killing three Israeli soldiers and capturing two, Israel and Hezbollah have engaged in intense hostilities. Israel has carried out hundreds of strikes against targets in Lebanon, including extensive attacks against Lebanon’s infrastructure, private homes and apartment buildings, as well as vehicles moving on roads. Israeli strikes have been especially heavy in Shi’a-dominated areas of Lebanon, considered to be Hezbollah strongholds, including southern Lebanon, the southern suburbs of Beirut, and the Beqaa Valley.
To date, the chief cause of civilian deaths from the Israeli campaign is targeted strikes on civilian homes in villages of Lebanon’s South. There has also been large-scale destruction of civilian apartment buildings in southern Beirut, though most of the residents of those buildings had evacuated prior to the attacks. According to the Lebanese Ministry of Social Affairs, the IDF destroyed or damaged up to 5,000 civilian homes in air strikes during the first two weeks of the war.
6 As demonstrated by the case studies below, Israel has caused large-scale civilian casualties by striking civilian homes, with no apparent military objective either inside the home or in the vicinity. In some cases, warplanes returned to strike again while residents and neighbors had gathered around the house to remove the dead and assist the wounded....
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Neighbors of mine left with a van and two cars, and I went with them. We first stopped at Bent Jbeil at the hospital because there was a plane in the air. When we started again, the plane came and hit the road in front and behind us, just ten meters away from us, with bombs. But we just kept driving. We were flying white flags. Along the way, we saw the dead still inside the cars. I remember well when we approached es-Soultaniye, there was a Mercedes 300 overturned with dead people inside, we wanted to stop but the driver said we would be hit. There were men, women and children, I remember seeing two dead children. Along the way, we met an old woman who was crying by the side of the road because no-one wanted to take her, so we took her with us. There was lots of destruction, all of the gas stations were bombed and we drove as fast as we could. It only got better when we crossed the Litani River.
90
Israel at times gave assurances to officials at UNIFIL that civilian cars traveling north on the main roads would not be attacked.
91 However, as documented in a number of examples below, Israel repeatedly attacked both individual vehicles and entire convoys of civilians who heeded the Israeli warnings to abandon their villages. The attacks on civilian vehicles were so fierce that, according to the Lebanese Red Cross, one ambulance driver witnessed three separate attacks while driving from Tebnine to Tyre with wounded civilans: first he witnessed the car in front of the ambulance get hit and fall into a ravine near Kafra; then a van got hit in Siddiquine, the blast of the explosion throwing the car into the air and hitting the ambulance on its side; and then a motorcycle got hit on the road near Hanaouay.
92
Although Israeli officials are no doubt aware of the civilian casualties that their bombing of vehicles has caused, such attacks continued apace as this report went to print. At best, the continued attacks on fleeing civilians show reckless disregard by Israel for its obligation to distinguish between civilian and military objects, and a complete failure to take adequate safeguards to prevent civilian deaths. At worst, Israel is deliberately targeting civilian vehicles as part of the price that must be paid to stop all traffic in parts of Lebanon. Either way, Israel is flagrantly violating its obligations under international humanitarian law, and its widespread attacks on civilian vehicles are war crimes....
http://hrw.org/reports/2006/lebanon0806/
