fugitive peace

Human Rights Watch is making no friends these days. Last week it had to scrap the Beirut launch of its report accusing Hizbullah leaders of possible war crimes over last summer’s Lebanon war, after Hizbullah goons threatened to break up the event. Today HRW published the sister report about why Israel killed so many Lebanese civilians. It makes chilling reading. Besides listing each one of the 1109 confirmed victims (mostly civilian) by name, it investigates 97 incidents in painstaking detail, analysing who died, how, and whether they were collateral casualties of a legitimate action under the laws of war, or - more often - victims of an attack that should never have been carried out.

The report’s bottom line: Israel’s claim that most civilians died because Hizbullah fighters were hiding and fighting in their midst is true only to a limited extent. Instead, says HRW, Israel bombed too widely and indiscriminately (including its infamous use of cluster bombs); assumed that all civilians had left their villages after it warned them to; and - most troubling for Israel itself - had to rely on inadequate and old intelligence. After the first few days of aerial bombing it ran out of known targets, and had to identify new ones to keep the campaign going. This led to mistakes such as bombing the civil defence offices in Tyre (killing 14 innocents) in the belief that they were the local Hizbullah headquarters.

There is, however, a moment of light relief in the HRW researchers’ investigation of Israel’s most famous and surreal mistake, when its troops raided a neighbourhood in Baalbek:

The object of the raid remains unclear. However, it appears that the Israeli commandos were looking for someone named Hassan Nasrallah, the same name as the secretary-general of Hezbollah. But the Hassan Nasrallah they found was a 54-year-old local shopkeeper who was not related to the leader of Hezbollah. As soon as they entered the home, they asked the shopkeeper in broken Arabic, “Are you Hassan Nasrallah?”

They took him, his son and three other men back to Israel, where

…Israeli officials repeatedly interrogated the men and accused them of being Hezbollah members. They repeatedly accused Hassan Deeb Nasrallah’s son, Bilal Nasrallah, of being the son of the Hezbollah Secretary-General, even though his father was with him. [my emphasis]

After three weeks Israel, with no official apology or explanation, returned the men to Lebanon. There, a HRW researcher tells me, they promptly came under suspicion of having been turned into Israeli spies, and had to endure a grilling from Lebanese military intelligence. Hizbullah’s reaction is not recorded.