Israel’s continued airstrikes against Lebanon are fueling growing criticism internationally, particularly as a substantial number of civilians are being swept up in the strikes and few obvious justifications are ever offered for the drone strikes in populated areas.
International watchdog Human Rights Watch (HRW) is the latest to speak up on the matter, saying there is growing evidence of violations of international law and indiscriminate attacks on civilian targets in Lebanon.
HRW noted that increasingly there seems to be insufficient effort to discriminate between civilian and military targets by Israeli forces, and they urged Lebanon to give the International Criminal Court (ICC) jurisdiction to investigate potential war crimes.
HRW cited two specific incidents which they thought should be investigated first. The first was a strike on Younine in late September, which targeted a building full of Syrian refugees and killed 23, wounding a number of others. Women and children were among the killed in this incident.
The second incident was on November 1, and targeted civilians along the Syria border near the Qusayr border crossing. 10 people were killed in that incident. Those were two of the more high profile strikes in late 2024 that hit civilians.
In the November case, Israel presented the incident as targeting a “Hezbollah warehouse.” The justification for Younine was never really offered, coming just ahead of the ground invasion of Lebanon, but HRW noted that everyone killed in both cases has been confirmed to be a civilian, 15 of them were children.
Israel continues to posthumously promote most of the people they killed to Hezbollah operatives, or even Hezbollah commanders. In the past week alone, nine of the people they killed were declared operatives of one form or another, though there is little evidence most of them were actually linked to Hezbollah in any way.
Israel continues to launch multiple strikes on Lebanon on a near daily basis, despite a ceasefire that’s been in place since November. More than 2,700 Israeli violations of the ceasefire have been reported in that time.
