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Amnesty: Israel Committed War Crimes

Comment by Larry Ross, September 2, 2006

Amnesty has done an excellent job of defining Israel's war crimes in Lebanon and Palestine. Israel is occupying both countries in violation of UN resolutions. Without U.S. encouragement and financial support, Israel would not be able to defy the UN and world opinion, including deliberately bombing a well-known and marked UN observation post in Lebanon.

The U.S. and Israel war strategies are intimately linked. Both countries are acting out a plan for domination  of the Middle East and its oil resources. The plan was conceived by Neo-Conservatives in the Bush Administration well before they gained power in 2,000. The U.S. war against Afghanistan, Iraq and soon Iran, as well as Israel's war on Lebanon, and in future Syria, are all a part of this plan.

We should also recognise that both the U.S. and Israel are prepared to resort to the use of nuclear weapons in their conquest. A careful analysis of the military situation and relevant papers on both our web site and others, would tend to support this finding.

I don't think people should lose sight of these factors in their attempts to stop this criminal madness before it becomes uncontrollable. 

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Amnesty: 'Israel committed war crimes'

by Doug Lorimer, August 30, 2006

On August 23, human rights group Amnesty International accused Israel of committing war crimes. Amnesty said that the pattern and scope of Israel's bombing campaign in Lebanon, statements by Israeli officials and the scale of damage inflicted on civilian infrastructure “indicated that such destruction was deliberate and part of a military strategy, rather than 'collateral damage'”.

A report by the group, Deliberate destruction or 'collateral damage'? , argued: “Many of the violations ... are war crimes that give rise to individual criminal responsibility. They include directly attacking civilian objects and carrying out indiscriminate or disproportionate attacks. People against whom there is prima facie evidence of responsibility for the commission of these crimes are subject to criminal accountability anywhere in the world through the exercise of universal jurisdiction.”

Despite this and similar indictments of its war on Lebanon, and despite agreeing to a UN-brokered “ceasefire” on August 14, Israel has made it clear that it will continue to carry out military attacks on Lebanon following the failure of its 34-day mass bombing campaign to destroy Hezbollah.

Hezbollah, a Shiite-based Lebanese party with 14 MPs and two cabinet ministers, led the armed resistance to Israel's 1982-2000 occupation of southern Lebanon and mounted a guerrilla defence against Israel's latest aggression that stunned the Israeli establishment with its effectiveness.

The August 20 New York Times reported that an unnamed high-ranking Israeli general said that Israel would attempt to kill Hezbollah secretary-general Hassan Nasrallah. “There's only one solution for him. This man must die”, the general said.

The general also said that Israel would launch attacks on any vehicles in Lebanon that the Israeli military “believes” are being used to smuggle arms from Syria to Hezbollah. Most of the 15,000 Israeli air attacks on Lebanon carried out between July 12 and August 14 — including those against roads, bridges, Red Cross ambulances and UN humanitarian relief convoys — were justified by Israeli officials as being aimed at stopping Hezbollah “rearming” its soldiers in southern Lebanon.

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