Hezbollah, Not Israel, Deserves Blame for Deaths and Injury of Lebanese Civilians During Last Summer's War

HRW has criticized Israel's conduct of its war against Hezbollah last summer arguing that Israel indiscriminately attacked civilians ("Israel Faulted in Death of Civilians in Lebanon," Washington Post, September 7, 2007 Just before Rosh Hashanah, Human Rights Watch (HRW) released its latest report in which it makes the outrageous charge, according to the Washington Post, that "Israel's 'frequent failure' to distinguish between military and civilian targets during the war in Lebanon last summer was the primary reason so many Lebanese civilians were killed in the bombing campaign…" ("Israel Faulted in Death of Civilians in Lebanon," September 7, 2007).

The refutation of those charges, below, authored by AJCongress President Richard S. Gordon, is based on a thorough reading of the HRW report as well as an elucidation of a number of points in international law that are particularly important for understanding that Hezbollah, rather than Israel, should be held accountable for injury to civilians. Among other deficiencies of the HRW report, his response points out that many of the HRW assumptions and charges are contradicted by a report by the Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center at the Center for Special Studies in Israel last fall that was sponsored by AJCongress and which showed conclusively that it was Hezbollah's use of "human shields," that is, its placement of rocket launchers within civilian settings, that led to the death of Lebanese civilians. HRW mostly ignores the evidence in the CSS report.

AJCongress is the leading agency in American Jewish life dealing with factual errors and with distortions in interpretation of the Law of War - such as those in the HRW report - that handicap Israel (and America as well) by branding self defense a criminal act. These distortions serve as a de facto aid to the terrorists. The American Jewish Congress is a membership association of Jewish Americans, organized to defend Jewish interests at home and abroad, through public policy advocacy, in the courts, Congress, the executive branch and state and local governments. It also works overseas with others who are similarly engaged.
_____________________________________________________________________________________Hezbollah, Not Israel, Deserves Blame for Deaths and Injury of Lebanese Civilians During Last Summer's WarBy Richard S. GordonHuman Rights Watch (HRW) has it exactly backwards. HRW has criticized Israel's conduct of its war against Hezbollah last summer arguing that Israel indiscriminately attacked civilians ("Israel Faulted in Death of Civilians in Lebanon," Washington Post, September 7, 2007). This is not only wrong and doesn't comport with the facts, but the direct opposite is true. Hezbollah caused the death and destruction in Lebanon and should be held accountable for it. Although a constant target of indiscriminate attacks on its civilians, Israel has always held the safety and preservation of civilian lives as one of its prime concerns. Sadly, in times of war, even the most careful of operations occasionally leads to a loss of civilian lives .

Israel has always stated that such outcomes are deeply regrettable.The HRW view is premised on an incorrect reading of the law that, if generally accepted, would make it impossible for any state to defend itself against terrorists or other irregular forces, and on an incorrect understanding of the motivation and actions of both Israel and Hezbollah. First, HRW concedes, that given Hezbollah's fighter's lack of uniforms, Israel would have "had difficulty distinguishing between Hezbollah's fighters and civilians." Yet HRW faults Israel for injuring or killing civilians as it attacked areas in which Israel believed Hezbollah fighters were lodged. Second, HRW accuses Israel of relying on an assumption that all civilians had left the area (because of warnings to civilians that Israel had issued) and that Israel, therefore, felt itself free to attack anyone present in the area of combat, assuming that they must be Hezbollah. HRW argues, relying on anecdotal evidence from Hezbollah sympathizers in Lebanon, that by the time the fighting began, Hezbollah had retired, in the main, to fields and orchards outside the villages and were no longer located in civilian areas. HRW accuses Israel of missing this important change in the battlefield, asserting that Israel relied on outdated information rather than on real-time intelligence.

The consequence is that civilians rather than Hezbollah fighters ended up bearing the brunt of the Israeli counter attacks. This HRW suggestion that a state defending itself may not do so unless it has real-time intelligence of the precise position of opposing forces before it may attack is worse than unreasonable . It makes no allowance for the inevitable mistakes resulting from the fog of war. It would deny Israel or any other state the means to effectively defend itself against attack from non-state organizations, like Hezbollah. But beyond this unreasonable burden that HRW attempts to apply to what a state must do before it may attack a terrorist's military facility, most important of all, HRW is simply wrong about the pattern of Israel's military response, the method it used for identifying military targets, and the timeliness and accuracy of its intelligence.

An AJCongress-supported study completed by the Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center at the Center for Special Studies in November 2006, several months after hostilities had concluded, carefully reviewed what had occurred during the fighting. The C.S.S. report documents hundreds of declassified Top Secret documents, reports, and photographs and scores of cases, in exhaustive detail, regarding targets Israel bombed, precisely where they were located, their military character and their distance from civilian centers. What that report conclusively proves is that in virtually every case that the C.S.S. could identify, Israel correctly attacked military targets, and precisely hit the target. Yet civilians were killed because Hezbollah had situated the military target in or near a civilian area. The report demonstrates in all of the cases examined that Israel exercised care and proved accurate in selection of targets, rather than relying on an assumption that civilians had left the area, or relying on outdated intelligence. Perhaps the most convincing evidence that Hezbollah fighters remained in civilian areas during the fighting is video interviews with Hezbollah fighters compiled as part of the C.S.S. analysis.

They document that this placement was not accidental but, rather, a result of the Hezbollah view that Hezbollah is indigenous to the civilian population and that it therefore is only natural to situate its forces within the civilian population. In short, the civilian casualties were a direct consequence of the decision by Hezbollah to situate its military targets among civilians. HRW nowhere responds to the actual footage of missiles being launched from civilian areas on days when it was reporting on events elsewhere. In the case of Qana, HRW ignored photos showing arms storehouses in civilian areas. International humanitarian law is a part of the Law of War (a phrase HRW, tellingly, never uses.).

International humanitarian law attempts to mitigate the harshness of war on the civilian . But it does not—unless distorted—forbid a defender from destroying its attacker's military targets hidden among civilians. If that were the case, no state could possibly defend itself from such terrorist attack. On the other hand, there is an absolute prohibition against an attacker - in this case Hezbollah - hiding its military assets among the civilian population. Thus, once again it is Hezbollah that is culpable in any civilian casualties that occurred, not Israel. Given a correct understanding of the rights of a nation to defend itself against terrorist attack, given a correct picture of the methods employed by Israel to select military targets and to avoid injury to civilians, and given a correct understanding of how Hezbollah operated to place its assets in civilian areas, it is clear that it is Hezbollah - not Israel - which is culpable in the civilian deaths that occurred during the fighting in Lebanon. HRW has already blamed Hezbollah for its attacks against civilians in Israel. Unless HRW seeks to argue that despite having had its soldiers killed and others kidnapped and its northern cities struck by rocket attack, Israel had no right to respond militarily, it is Hezbollah which is to blame for civilian casualties in Lebanon as well.

Mr. Gordon is President of the American Jewish Congress.