israel's conscious crimes:
This week marks a year since the end of hostilities now officially called the Second Lebanon War by Israel. A month of fighting -- mostly Israeli aerial bombardment of Lebanese civil infrastructure and residential areas, 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 Israeli civilians.
(...) Other 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. International media has ignored the UN's admission.
(...) 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 three million.
(...) 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. Udi Adam, head of the Northern Command at the time, apparently gave the order. 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, that 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 suggested that Hizbullah fighters would be 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 that have been carrying out extensive searches of south Lebanon to disarm Hizbullah under the terms of Resolution 1701. According to the UN, some 33 of these underground bunkers -- or more than 90 per cent -- have been located and the 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.
(...) Hizbullah's movement of some 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.
(...) Human Rights Watch, however, has argued that, because Hizbullah's 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.
(...) The evidence so far indicates that Israel: first, 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; second, initiated a war of aggression by refusing to engage in talks about a prisoner swap offered by Hizbullah; third, committed a grave war crime by intentionally using cluster bombs against south Lebanon's civilians; fourth, repeatedly hit Lebanese communities, killing many civilians, even though the evidence is that Hizbullah fighters were not to be found there; and fifth, put its own, mainly Arab, civilians in great danger by making their communities targets for Hizbullah attacks and failing to protect them.