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VIII. Civilian Casualty Incidents Investigated by Human Rights Watch

During the course of five months of research in Lebanon and Israel, Human Rights Watch investigated in depth the deaths of over 561 persons during Israeli air and groundstrikes, and collected information about an additional 548 deaths, thus accounting for a total number of 1,109 deaths (approximately 860 civilians and approximately 250 combatants¹⁹⁶) from the 34-day conflict. Our research is the most comprehensive available documenting how, and why, civilians died during the conflict.

In order to give as complete a picture of the Israel military campaign as possible, this section provides details on 94 attacks involving the deaths of 510 civilians and 51 Hezbollah fighters that we investigated in depth. The relevant details of these attacks—date, time, place, GPS coordinates, deaths, and mode of attack—are also summarized in a table annexed to this report.

Most of the cases described suggest humanitarian law violations; however, the mere fact of civilian casualties does not mean that a humanitarian law violation occurred. While many of these attacks involved solely civilian deaths with no evidence of military objectives, others did strike a legitimate military target. Accordingly, not all of the cases included in this chapter involve violations of the laws of war by Israeli forces since we also include cases of legitimate military strikes by the Israeli forces that resulted solely in combatant casualties (from Hezbollah or other military groups), or combatant and collateral civilian casualties.

In other cases included in this chapter, unlawful Hezbollah actions—including the unlawful storage of weapons in civilian homes and firing of rockets from populated civilian areas—contributed directly to deadly Israeli counterstrikes. Because the media reported some of these cases as involving only civilian casualties, we have included them in this report to clarify the circumstances. Our findings make clear that not all civilian casualties are indicative of a violation of the laws of war. However, as demonstrated in the case studies below, the vast majority of cases involving civilian casualties involved solely civilian casualties, with no evidence of any military objectives in the vicinity.

There still is no complete list of all deadly attacks that took place inside Lebanon during the 34-day conflict, as many Israeli strikes were and continue to be unreported and undocumented. In almost all of the southern Lebanese villages visited by Human Rights Watch, researchers found new, previously undocumented and unreported cases of civilian and Hezbollah deaths. Human Rights Watch did not visit every village in southern Lebanon, and it is nearly certain that there are many more cases of civilian deaths that are not included in this report or reported elsewhere.

In many cases of civilian and Hezbollah deaths, moreover, there were no witnesses, and no reliable information exists regarding the circumstances of the deaths. This is especially true in the case of deaths involving Hezbollah fighters, since Hezbollah often refused to discuss the circumstances surrounding the deaths of their fighters. There are also many cases of civilians, especially elderly civilians, who were found dead in the rubble of their homes after the war, without any witnesses knowing exactly when and why the home had been struck. In addition to the cases of 510 civilian and 51 Hezbollah deaths documented by Human Rights Watch in this section of the report, Human Rights Watch obtained some information about an additional 548 deaths, mainly from visiting graveyards and reviewing hospital records, but does not know the exact circumstances of those deaths. Taken together, Human Rights Watch can thus account for a total of 1,109 deaths (approximately 860 civilians and approximately 250 combatants) from the 34-day conflict.

This chapter breaks the deaths into several categories: those due to attacks striking civilian homes, those due to attacks on civilian vehicles fleeing the conflict, collateral civilian deaths in strikes on infrastructure, and unlawful killings by Israeli ground forces. Each section includes a discussion of legitimate attacks on Hezbollah military targets, in order to give as complete a picture of the Israeli campaign as possible.

A. Attacks on Civilian Homes

Following the initial bombing on July 12 of southern roads, bridges, villages, and Hezbollah targets for the stated purpose of preventing Hezbollah from moving the two captured IDF soldiers, Israel began a more widespread bombing campaign against suspected Hezbollah targets just before 4 a.m. on July 13, carrying out pinpoint strikes on suspected Hezbollah members’ homes and weapons stores. Israel claims to have destroyed most of Hezbollah’s long-range missiles in this early-hour raid (which reportedly lasted 34 minutes).¹⁹⁷ Human Rights Watch found that many of those strikes killed only civilians, although at least one hit a Hezbollah weapons store.

Killing of 10 Civilians in Baflay, July 13

At around 3:50 a.m. on July 13, two air strikes completely destroyed the two-story home of Munir Zain, and killed 10 persons inside. Zain was a farmer who also owned a truck used to collect the garbage in his village of Baflay, 10 kilometers east of Tyre. Ahmad Roz, a 46-year-old salesman who lived just 150 meters from the Zain home, described the attack to Human Rights Watch:

There was a big air strike between Baflay and al-Shehabiyye. We could see that attack from our home and were watching. Suddenly we heard a loud noise and saw a bright flash. Our doors were blown open. All we saw coming from the Zain house was smoke. Then there was a second strike.¹⁹⁸

Munir Zain’s cousin, Qasim Zain, a 24-year-old who worked for the Lebanese Civil Defense and assisted with the recovery effort after the strike, recalled being dumbfounded by the level of destruction. “Everything was destroyed; the biggest pieces we found were single bricks. I’ve witnessed the result of a lot of air strikes, but had never seen anything like this. The entire area was covered with grey dust, and the two-story building was completely flat.”¹⁹⁹

Those killed in the attack include: Munir Zain, 47; his wife Najla, 42; his five children `Ali, 19, a Lebanese army soldier; Wala, 18; Hassan, 13; Fatima, seven; and Hussain, four; two Kuwaiti nationals who had arrived a week earlier, Haidar bin Nahi, 40, Munir’s son-in-law, and Abdullah bin Nahi, 70, Haidar’s father; and a Sri Lankan maid whose name was unknown to witnesses.²⁰⁰

The villagers of Baflay and the Zain family denied that Munir or his family had any links to Hezbollah. His cousin, Qasim, said:

I was surprised that it was my uncle’s house that was hit … Munir was a farmer with livestock, and he also used to collect the garbage. He was not involved with the resistance, and if he was with the resistance he would not have stayed in his house. All the Hezbollah people left their homes on the first day, with their families.²⁰¹

Other villagers also said that Munir had no connection to Hezbollah, and that there was no Hezbollah military activity in the vicinity of his home at the time of the attack.²⁰² Hezbollah has not claimed any of the people killed in the attack as fighters or martyrs; there are no Hezbollah martyr posters for the family, and they have been buried as civilians, a strong indication that they had no links to Hezbollah.

The IDF has offered no explanation for the strike on the Zain home. A field visit to the Zain home reveals a possible explanation. It is located at the very outskirts of Baflay, at the end of a dead-end road with an unpopulated valley and olive groves behind it; Munir had his garbage truck parked next to the home. It is possible that the IDF mistook the location of the home and the presence of the truck as signs of a Hezbollah rocket firing position, as Hezbollah often fired truck-mounted missiles from unpopulated areas on the outskirts of villages. The initial wave of Israeli strikes reportedly targeted Hezbollah’s long- and medium-range missiles. According to a report compiled by the IDF-affiliated Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center, Hezbollah fired a number of rockets from and near Baflay during the war.²⁰³ However, all the villagers interviewed by Human Rights Watch were consistent in stating that there was no Hezbollah military activity in the vicinity of Munir’s home prior to the attack, so it is unlikely the Israeli attack was in response to evidence of actual Hezbollah rocket fire from the location.

Killing of Four Civilians in Srifa, July 13

At around 3:50 a.m. on July 13, an IDF air strike demolished the home of 34-year-old `Akil Merhi, a Brazilian-Lebanese dual national, killing him, his wife, and his two young children. Fatima Musa, a Srifa resident who lived just next to the Merhi home, described what happened that night to Human Rights Watch:

First they hit a school building at night, from Wednesday [July 12] to Thursday [July 13], starting at around 3:30 to 4 a.m. Then, they hit the house just behind us. We didn’t hear the airplanes, we just heard the rocket [explosion]. We were sleeping and woke up when the house lit up from the explosions. My son was shivering with fear.²⁰⁴

Akil Merhi was a Brazilian-Lebanese businessman who lived and worked in Brazil, and had returned to Srifa for a summer holiday just one month prior to his death. He was well-known in Srifa for his generosity to his home village and used much of his business earnings to help develop Srifa, but was not affiliated with Hezbollah. According to his relatives, Merhi, like many Lebanese, had spent the night discussing the July 12 Hezbollah abductions and the subsequent events with his friends in Srifa, who included Shi`a religious figures, “Sayyids and Shaikhs,” but “it was not a Hezbollah meeting.”²⁰⁵ Merhi left his friend’s house at 3 a.m; his home was struck as soon as he entered it and turned on the light: “When he entered the house and turned on the light, the missile came, so they were targeting him,” a cousin recalled. “He was still dressed in his [going-out] clothes when we found his body.”²⁰⁶

In a statement, the IDF claimed to have struck “two Hezbollah bases” in Srifa on that day.²⁰⁷

The family of four killed in the attack were all Brazilian-Lebanese dual nationals: `Akil Merhi, 34; his wife Ahlam Jaber, 25; and their children `Abd al-Hadi, 9, and Fatima, 4. Hezbollah claimed neither `Akil nor his wife as martyrs or fighters, and they are buried as civilians. There are no “martyr” posters of the Merhis to suggest any Hezbollah affiliation.

According to villagers, fire from Israeli warplanes initially prevented them from recovering the bodies from the rubble. According to one witness:

The first time some villagers tried to get the bodies out, a warplane fired another missile on the home. Eventually we were able to get the bodies out, but that was about noon. The bodies were buried in the village around 5 p.m.²⁰⁸

There was no Hezbollah activity around the home when the second missile struck, the villagers said.

Wounding of Three Civilians during Attack on Home of Hezbollah Military Official, al-Shehabiyye, July 13

At about 3:50 a.m. on July 13, an Israeli air strike hit the home of Mahmud Baydun, a 45-year-old welder who was also a village-level Hezbollah military official in al-Shehabiyye, a village located about 10 kilometers east of the southern port city of Tyre, on the main highway to Tibnine. Baydun was at home with his wife and five children at the time of the attack. The attack injured three of Baydun’s sons: Samih, 20, Muhammad, 17, and Ahmad, 10, none of whom were affiliated with Hezbollah.²⁰⁹ By remaining in his home, Mahmud Baydun endangered the lives of his civilian family members. Even if Israel was targeting a legimate military target (Mahmud Baydun, a Hezbollah military official) in the strike, Israel would be responsible for taking into account the likely civilian casualties of attacking him in his home in determining whether the military gain of attacking him there outweighed the civilian harm.

Killing of 13 Civilians in Dweir, July 13

On Thursday, July 13, at about 4:00 a.m., Israeli warplanes struck the home of Shi`a cleric Shaikh `Adil Muhammad Akash, killing the cleric and 11 members of his family. Shaikh Akash was an Iranian-educated cleric believed to have been affiliated with Hezbollah, but there is no indication that he took part in hostilities or had a commanding role, either of which would have made him a legitimate military target. Hezbollah members in Dweir told Human Rights Watch that Shaikh Akash was not involved in Hezbollah military activities, stating that he was simply a religious figure in the village.²¹⁰ However, Shaikh Akash does appear on a poster of Hezbollah “martyrs” from the village, indicating he had links with Hezbollah; however, an association alone does not establish combatant status.

Shaikh Akash taught at a Shi`a religious seminary in Saida that an Israeli air strike destroyed on July 23. According to some residents of Saida—a mostly Sunni town that generally does not support Hezbollah—the seminary where Shaikh Akash taught was a “Hezbollah mosque,” and some have made unconfirmed and questionable claims that Hezbollah used the seminary to store weapons.²¹¹

The first missile demolished the two-story home located on the edge of Dweir, in a sparsely populated area on the road to Jibchit. A second missile fired minutes later failed to explode. According to an eyewitness who lived nearby, the Shaikh and his family had returned to the home just twenty minutes before the strike—many Lebanese families had spent that night visiting friends to discuss the events of the previous day and the war that had started. The strike killed Shaikh `Adil Muhammad Akash; his wife Rabab Yasin, 39; and 10 of their children: Muhammad Baker, 18; Fatima, 17; Zainab, 13; `Ali Rida, 12; Ghadir, 10; Muhammad Hassan, 7; Sara, 5; Batul, 4; Nur al-Huda, 2; and Safa’, two months. The family’s Sri Lankan maid, whose name is unknown to Human Rights Watch, also died in the attack.

Human Rights Watch found no evidence of Hezbollah military activity during a visit to the bomb site, and Dweir residents also denied that there had been any Hezbollah military activity around the home. The village of Dweir is located too far from the Israeli border (40 kilometers) to serve as an effective launching pad for short or mid-range rockets.

The apparent targeting of Shaikh Akash exemplifies Israel’s targeting of individuals affiliated with Hezbollah regardless of whether they were participating in military hostilities. Should Israel have information otherwise, they should make it public, as well as information justifying an attack that caused so many civilian deaths. This attack on someone who was by all accounts a civilian cost the lives of thirteen civilians, nine of them children.

Killing of Six Civilians in Shhour, July 13

At approximately 4:00 a.m. on July 13, several missiles struck the home of German-Lebanese dual national Mustafa Khashab, a 43-year-old car dealer in Germany who had come to Lebanon on June 28 for his summer holiday in his native village. The strike demolished Khashab’s home, and killed Khashab and five of his relatives: his wife Najwa `Ali al-Medani, 37; their daughter Yasmin, 14; a cousin, Sara Ahmad Yasin, 16; Mustapha’s father, `Ali Amid, 73; and his sister, Khadija `Ali, 48. Mustafa Khashab’s 12-year-old son Ahmad, who was in the bathroom at the time of the attack, was the only survivor and was transferred to Germany for critical medical treatment soon after.

According to his relatives, rescue workers, and village officials, Khashab had no links to Hezbollah, and there was no Hezbollah activity in or near his home prior to the attack.²¹² An aunt of Mustafa who had visited the home on the evening prior to the attack and left at about 11 p.m. did not notice any unusual activity.²¹³

Khashab had left Lebanon at age 14 to seek a better life and had permanently settled in Germany. He had built a home in his native village and often returned for summer vacations. For the rest of the year, his parents occupied the house. Khashab and the relatives who died with him are buried as civilians, and there are no indications on their graves and no martyr posters to suggest membership in Hezbollah.

Israeli officials have offered no explanation for the attack on Mustafa Khashab’s home. However, one possible reason for the attack is that Khashab’s brother, Safi Khashab, is a “higher-up” member of Hezbollah in Beirut, according to two sources interviewed by Human Rights Watch in Shhour. The sources did not specify if Safi Khashab was active on the military or civilian side of Hezbollah.²¹⁴ Although Safi Khashab normally resides in Beirut and does not keep a home in Shhour, he was visiting his brother in Shhour on July 12, and left the village that night. Mustafa also tried to leave Shhour to take his family to safety north of Tyre, but he was unable to make his way there because air strikes had destroyed the road.²¹⁵ A relative told Human Rights Watch: “They tried to leave together, but Mustafa’s car was too heavy so he couldn’t cross [the river]. He decided to sleep here and then leave the next day. He was afraid that night, because of the noise from the drones and the fighter jets.”²¹⁶

The Israeli authorities should provide information as to why they believed the Khashab home was a valid military objective, including whether they believed Safi Khashab had a military role with Hezbollah, whether they believed him to be present at the time of the attack and what efforts were made to determine the extent of a civilian presence, and what calculation of expected military advantage and civilian harm led them to authorize the attack.

Killing of Two Civilians in Strike on Hezbollah Arms Storage Facility, Bar`ashit, July 13

On July 13, at around 4 a.m., an Israeli air strike on the village of Bar`ashit demolished the home of Najib Hussain Farhat, a lottery card seller, and the unoccupied neighboring home of his brother, who had moved to Beirut in 1996. The air strike killed Najib Hussain Farhat, 54, and his 16-year-old daughter, Zainab, and severely injured his wife, son, and daughter.

According to a well-informed source in the village, Hezbollah had rented the basement of the unoccupied home and had enlarged it into a “warehouse” to store large numbers of weapons. Neither Hezbollah nor Najib’s relatives had informed Najib or his family about the Hezbollah weapons cache next door, so they had not felt the need to evacuate their home when war broke out. The surviving relatives complained to Hezbollah officials about this incident, and were met first with denials and then with threats from Hezbollah that it would withhold compensation to the family if they spoke out publicly:

After the incident, the family had a fight with Hezbollah. At first, Hezbollah denied the allegations, but when the whole town learned of the incident, they finally admitted it. The person they complained to is also in charge of compensation for the family, and he delayed the payment to the family. The family has stopped speaking out because they are afraid they will lose the compensation.²¹⁷

By storing weapons in the village prior to the start of hostilities and not warning residents of the danger, Hezbollah violated the humanitarian law prohibition to avoid locating military objectives in densely populated areas.

Killing of 12 Civilians in Zebqine, July 13

At 8:20 a.m. on July 13, Israeli warplanes fired two missiles at the home of Na`im Bzeih, the late mayor of the village of Zebqine (who died in 2001), located some five kilometers north of the Israel-Lebanon border. At the time of the attack, 14 members of the Bzeih family had gathered in the house because it was an old stone house with a strong foundation and thick walls. Darwish, the 42-year-old son of the late mayor, was standing on a balcony when the attack took place, and recalled:

Suddenly, I found myself in a pile of rubble. The blast of the explosion blew me 10 meters away, across the road. Everyone on the ground floor had been killed. I didn’t even hear the explosion; I just flew into an olive grove and woke up covered with dust and shrapnel, bleeding.²¹⁸

Twelve people died in the attack, including six women and five children: Fatima, 78, Na`im’s wife; Taniya, 64, his sister; Maryam al-Hussaini, 54, his daughter-in-law; Su`ad Nasur, 39, Darwish’s wife; Amal, 44, Na`im’s daughter; Na`im Wa’il, 18, a grandson; Kholud, 18, a granddaughter; Farah, 14, a granddaughter; `Aziza, 11, a granddaughter; Malik and his twin Muhammad, 17, grandsons; and Hussain, 12, a grandson. All of them were buried as civilians, and Hezbollah has not claimed any of them as fighters or martyrs. It did claim three other men from the village, who died on separate occasions, as fighters.

The Bzeih family denied any links to Hezbollah. Darwish, who was wounded in the attack, said: “My father died in 2001. He was the mukhtar for 35 years and never belonged to any political party. He had no links with Hezbollah. All of us are independent; we are not with Hezbollah. All of the villagers were surprised when our house was hit, because people know we are not Hezbollah.”²¹⁹ A respected human rights activist, who personally knew the late mayor and his family, independently told Human Rights Watch that the family had no links to Hezbollah.²²⁰

Darwish also confirmed there was no Hezbollah movement or activity around the house at the time of the attack: “There were no Hezbollah people around the house or firing from anywhere. We were on the balcony and didn’t see anything.”²²¹

The IDF has offered no explanation for the strike on the Bzeih home. According to the Erlich report, Hezbollah fired two rockets from Zebqine houses during the war.²²² However, Hezbollah had not yet begun launching large numbers of rockets at Israel when the attack on the Bzeih home took place, so it is unlikely that the Israeli strike was in response to Hezbollah rocket fire.

Killing of Two Civilians and One Hezbollah Fighter, Yatar, July 13

At 3 p.m. on July 13, an Israeli air strike demolished a home in Yatar, killing three persons inside. Among those killed was an active Hezbollah fighter, 21 year-old Muhammad `Ali Najib Suidan.<sup>223</sup> In addition to Muhammad, the strike killed two civilians: his cousin `Ali Muhammad `Akil, 25, who was a Hezbollah supporter but not a fighter,²²⁴ and Muhammad’s mother, Arwa Jamil, 56.²²⁵ The civilians accepted the risk of attack by allowing their cousin, a combatant, into their home, and thus became collateral casualties during a legitimate military strike on a combatant.

Killing of Four Civilians, including US-Lebanese National, in a Building with an Empty Hezbollah-Rented Apartment, Bint Jbeil, July 15

At about 8:55 a.m. on July 15, an Israeli warplane fired a missile at a three-story building in Bint Jbeil, a large town near Lebanon’s border with Israel. According to Jamal Sa`ad, a 45-year-old bus driver who lived next door to the building: “We were inside our house, and the situation was pretty normal. I looked out and saw an Israeli drone in the sky. One second later, there was a huge explosion next door.”²²⁶ The attack killed Khalil Ibrahim Mrouj, age 85, popularly known as Hajj Abu Naji,²²⁷ and his daughter, Najwa Khalil, 60.

According to Bint Jbeil villagers, neither of the victims had any links with Hezbollah: “Hajj Abu Naji was not Hezbollah; he was an old man who didn’t work anymore. The Hajj just lived in his house with his daughter.”²²⁸ Both were buried as civilians in Bint Jbeil and are not claimed as martyrs by Hezbollah. However, a neighbor told Human Rights Watch that Hezbollah rented an apartment in the same three-story building, but it had been empty since the war had begun:

We were expecting this house to be attacked. It was a three-story building, and Hezbollah had rented an apartment on the third floor. We knew it was rented by Hezbollah, but not what for. But there were no weapons inside … Since the first day of the war, there was no one from Hezbollah in that building … The Hajj who died was not related to Hezbollah, and he was not the owner of the apartment rented to Hezbollah.²²⁹

After the strike, the villagers searched all over the village for the two missing people, before realizing they had been inside the collapsed three-story building. They then mounted a rescue effort: “There were fears that the place would be attacked again, but people started the rescue effort and it grew bigger.”²³⁰

While villagers were attempting to dig the bodies out of the rubble, an Israeli drone fired a missile at the rescue party, killing two rescuers: Bilal Hreish, 31, a US-Lebanese dual national, and Mahmud Muhammad al-Sa`id Ahmad, 28. Both were members of Hezbollah’s unofficial civil defense (which is distinct and operates separately from the Lebanese government’s civil defense organization) and properly wore civilian clothes.²³¹ The drone strike wounded many others, including two of Hajj Mrouj’s sons and a 16-year-old boy, Hashim Kazan, who told Human Rights Watch how he was wounded in the second attack:

The [unofficial Hezbollah] civil defense was there to help us [recover the bodies.] Originally, there were about 50 people at the rubble trying to help us, but then there were only about 10. We were on the rooftop of the house when we were hit. I didn’t hear anything, I just heard the explosion.²³²

Following the deadly attack, the rescue effort was abandoned and the bodies were recovered only at the end of the war, on August 16.

Hezbollah’s rental of building space did not transform the apartment building into a military objective. Even if Hezbollah were occupying the building at the time, it still would have been necessary for the IDF to determine whether it was being used for military purposes. By apparently basing their attack on dated intelligence information, Israel failed to take all necessary precautions to determine whether this civilian object was a valid military target at the time of attack. Even if the Hezbollah apartment was a legitimate target (for example, by serving a military role) Israel also should have taken into account the likely civilian casualties of attacking the apartment building in determining whether the military gain of attacking the Hezbollah office outweighed the civilian harm.

The drone attack on the rescue party, involving several bulldozers operating in broad daylight to remove the rubble, appears to have been a deliberate attack on civilians. Israeli drones, some of which have the ability to transmit live video footage back to their operators, should have made it possible for the operators to see the rescue party.

Killing of Two Civilians, Houla, July 15

On July 15, around 8 p.m., an Israeli Apache helicopter fired two missiles into the home of Ibrahim Slim,²³³ a wage laborer, in the village of Houla, located on the Israel-Lebanon border, about 25 kilometers east of Tyre. According to Slim, the situation in Houla was relatively calm at the time, with cars and people out on the street. His son `Ali, a 30-year-old van driver, had returned from visiting a friend with his motorcycle just 10 minutes before the attack, and the family of 14 was just sitting down to dinner when the missiles struck.²³⁴ The helicopters had been circling over the area for about an hour prior to launching the missiles.

The attack by guided missiles destroyed most of the home, as the missiles entered through the front door and exploded inside. The attack killed two young women: Salma Slim, 23; and Ibrahim’s daughter-in-law Zainab Hassan Fakih, 22, the mother of a 7-month-old girl. It also injured two people: `Ali Slim, the 30-year-old van driver, and his brother in law `Ali Sa`ad, age unknown.

Ibrahim told Human Rights Watch that neither he nor his sons were involved with Hezbollah: “I don’t know why my home was attacked. I am not with Hezbollah, and my sons are not involved with them. I’ve always prohibited my sons from being involved with Hezbollah or the resistance.”²³⁵ Other villagers, interviewed separately by Human Rights Watch, also denied that anyone in the family had links to Hezbollah. “Neither he nor his children were involved with Hezbollah, nor was there any [Hezbollah] resistance in the town at the time,” said his neighbor, `Ali Rizak.²³⁶ Human Rights Watch saw no Hezbollah symbols inside the remnants of the Slim home during a visit. Both women who died in the attack were buried as civilians.

The IDF has offered no explanation for the strike on the Slim home. According to the Erlich report, Hezbollah fired two rockets from within Houla houses during the war, on an unspecified date.²³⁷ However, there is no evidence that the Slim home was one of these houses.

Killing of Three Hezbollah Fighters, Yatar, July 16

At 5 p.m. on July 16, an IDF air strike demolished a civilian home in the village of Yatar, located some four kilometers north of the Israeli border. The air strike killed three Hezbollah fighters: Hassan `Ali Karim, 22; Hussain `Ali Qurani, 21; and Muhammad Hussain Ja`far, 23. The graves of the three men clearly identified them as Hezbollah “martyrs,” not civilians. Hezbollah representatives attempted to prevent Human Rights Watch from investigating the deaths, but a relative of one of the men killed told Human Rights Watch that the men had stored a Hezbollah rocket launcher inside the home when they were attacked:

They were actual Hezbollah fighters. They died as fighters. They had a missile launcher inside the house. They were not firing the missile launcher from the house. They would go fire it and then come back to the house. Hezbollah took the [destroyed] rocket launcher away afterwards.²³⁸

Although the use of a civilian home to store a rocket launcher places civilians at risk by making it more likely that the IDF will attack ostensible civilian structures thinking that they are serving a military purpose, the Hezbollah fighters in this particular case were staying in a home without a civilian presence, and civilians had largely abandoned the neighborhood. “The area was empty,”according to the deputy mayor, a leftist independent unaffiliated with Hezbollah.²³⁹ The Israeli strike targeting three Hezbollah fighters who were actively engaged in firing rockets was a legitimate military strike.

Killing of Eight Civilians in Tyre (Sidon Institute), July 16

Between 12 and 1 p.m. on July 16, Israeli air strikes hit a residential apartment building at the outskirts of Tyre and an adjoining house owned by Marwan Hussain Shahin, a Palestinian who operated a butcher shop near the Bass refugee camp. The building (which people often refer to as the Sidon Institute because it used to house the educational facility) and house were located next to banana groves behind the Jabal `Amel hospital.

One of the residents of the building was Yasir `Alawiya, an accountant who used to work at the Hezbollah-affiliated Islamic Institution for Education and Learning (al-Mu’assasa al-Islamiyya lil-Tarbiyya Wal-Ta`lim), and at the time of the attack worked for al-Qard al-Hassan, an Islamic bank linked to Hezbollah. There is no evidence that Yasir Alawiya took part in Hezbollah’s military activities. His prior affiliation with a Hezbollah-affiliated organization, or his employment at an Islamic bank, even if Hezbollah-linked, did not make him a legitimate military target.

Eight members of the `Alawiya family died in the attack on the apartment building.Yasir Alawiya lost his wife, Marwa al-Hajj Hassan, 26, and his two children, Batul, 5, and `Abbas, 4. Yasir’s brother, `Ali, also lost his wife and three children as they had sought shelter in Yasir’s apartment: Husn Jaffal, 26, Zainab 9, Hussain, 8, and Aya, 5.<sup>240</sup> Yasir and `Ali’s mother, Maryam Ibrahim, 80, also died in the attack. The Shahin home adjacent to the building was empty, as its inhabitants had left it the previous night after the banana groves next to their house had come under attack.²⁴¹

A neighbor of the `Alawiya family said that there was no Hezbollah presence in the building.²⁴² Human Rights Watch’s investigation on the use of the groves behind the hospital could not conclusively establish whether Hezbollah had used those specific banana groves to fire rockets, although the fact that these same banana groves had come under Israeli attack the night prior to the attack on the Sidon Institute may suggest that Hezbollah rocket fire had originated from there. Another possibility is that the target was the microfinance institution affiliated with Hezbollah, al-Qard al-Hassan, located in a neighboring building.²⁴³

The IDF has offered no explanation for the strike on the building and home.

Killing of 14 Civilians in Tyre, July 16

Between 5 and 6 p.m. on July 16, two Israeli air strikes hit a residential apartment building that housed the Lebanese government’s civil defense offices in Tyre (unaffiliated with Hezbollah) on its first floor, collapsing the top four floors of the building.²⁴⁴ The apartment of Sayyid `Ali al-Amin, the Shi`a mufti of the Tyre and Jabal `Amel regions, and the offices of former member of parliament, Muhammad `Abd al-Hamid Baydun, were also in the building. Neither al-Amin nor Baydun is affiliated with Hezbollah—al-Amin is a frequent and outspoken critic of Hezbollah—nor were they present in the building at the time of the attack.

Human Rights Watch is not aware of any potential military target in the building, and Israeli officials have given no explanation for the attack. The building did have a number of large communication antennas on its roof, which may have been the target of the attack. The strikes also damaged three neighboring apartment buildings, eight to 10 stories high.

A report compiled by the IDF-affiliated Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center mistakenly identifies the civil defense force offices in the building as “the Hezbollah headquarters in Tyre,” but offers no evidence to support that assertion. The misidentification of this building in the report, which is almost exclusively based on a review of Israeli intelligence, may have formed the basis for the attacks and demonstrates the failure of the IDF to take adequate precautions to ensure the attack was on a valid military target.

In Lebanon, civil defense (which are affiliated with the Lebanese state, not with Hezbollah) mostly carry out activities such as firefighting and providing medical and humanitarian assistance during crises. Human Rights Watch found no evidence that Lebanese civil defense took part in hostilities between Hezbollah and Israel, or that Hezbollah fighters were in the building or storing military equipment there.

According to two residents of the apartment building interviewed by Human Rights Watch, the building residents were mostly teachers and doctors from the nearby hospital.²⁴⁵ A building resident and the director-general of the civil defense both told Human Rights Watch that Hezbollah had no presence in the buildings attacked.²⁴⁶

Zakaria `Alamadin, 18, had just left the basement of the apartment building when an Israeli missile hit the building, wounding him. “Everything just went dark and things were falling on me,” he said.<sup>247</sup> Among those killed in the basement of the building were Zakaria’s father, Muhammad Hussain, a 55-year-old teacher, and Zakaria’s 15-year-old brother, `Ali Muhammad.

Muhammad Alamadin, his son `Ali, and seven others killed as a result of the attack were transferred to Tyre public hospital where they were temporarily buried during a public ceremony on July 21. The names of the other seven buried were: Najib Shamsuddin, `Ali Shamsuddin, Haitam Hassan Muzyid, 34, Hussain Hassan Muzyid, 38, `Alia Wehbi, 40, Sally Wehbi, and Ayman Daher.<sup>248</sup> A tenth victim, one-year-old Lin `Ali Safeedin, was taken to a Saida hospital and then buried in her home village of Sham`a.²⁴⁹

A civil defense official in Tyre told Human Rights Watch on August 1 that two bodies remained trapped in the rubble of the collapsed top floors of the building, including the body of an unidentified woman.²⁵⁰ When Human Rights Watch visited the civil defense building that day, the smell of decomposing bodies remained.²⁵¹ Following the end of the war, four more victims were identified, for a total of 14 persons killed: Muhammad Yusif Ibrahim, 58; Ibrahim Saksouk, age unknown; Zainab Fakhury, 66; and Kundbsejen Runjani, a Sri Lankan maid.

Ten staff members of the Lebanese civil defense and 25 volunteers were inside the civil defense offices at the time of the attack.²⁵² According to a civil defense official in Tyre, the attack injured eight members of the civil defense team, including the head of the civil defense center, `Abbas Ghorayeb, who was hospitalized in critical condition but has since recovered.²⁵³

Speaking after his recovery to Human Rights Watch, `Abbas Ghorayeb explained that dozens of families from neighboring villages had sought shelter in the basement of the civil defense building, believing that it would be safe from attack. Because Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah was speaking on television at the time of the attack, many families had gone inside to listen to his speech, which probably reduced the death toll of the attack.

The civil defense officials were busy organizing a recovery effort following an earlier air strike at the Sidon Institute (see prior case) when two missiles struck their building, one on top and another on the side at street level. Following the strike, falling rubble caused additional casualties and fatalities, covering the area surrounding the building in rubble up to one meter deep. Like the other witnesses interviewed by Human Rights Watch, Ghorayeb told Human Rights Watch that there was no Hezbollah presence in the building: “There was nothing in relation to Hezbollah there.”²⁵⁴

The civil defense headquarters in Tyre, after Israeli airstrikes on July 16, 2006, that killed 14 civilians and wounded many more. Israeli intelligence misidentified the building as the “Hezbollah Headquarters” in Tyre. © 2006 Peter Bouckaert/Human Rights Watch

Another witness, a twenty-year-veteran of the civil defense unit, gave a more detailed overview of the civilian nature of the building and the lack of any military target inside the building in a separate interview with Human Rights Watch:

The building was a 14-story building, and it was full [of civilians in the basement]. Under us, there was a big hall, a warehouse almost, used as a shelter. There were lots of displaced people who were sheltering there because they believed the civil defense headquarters would not be targeted. …The upper six floors that were destroyed were empty; there was no one there except a woman and her Sri Lankan maid….

The building was civilian. There was nothing [Hezbollah] in it. We have a long history in that building. On the first floor, next to our office, there is an office of ex-minister Muhammad `Abd al-Hamid Baydun. The offices of the Mufti of Tyre and Jabal Amel’s are on the sixth floor; they were not hit. On the eighth floor, there was the apartment of the director of Tibnine government hospital, a Lebanese Army colonel.

There was no Hezbollah around. The entire neighborhood was appalled by the attack on our building. The people living in these buildings would have evacuated the area if they had suspected any Hezbollah presence, just as they did in the case of the buildings that housed the offices of Shaikh Nabil Qaouk, he is with Hezbollah, and his building was destroyed.²⁵⁵

Civil defense organizations play a key role in the protection of the civilian population. International humanitarian law provides that they and their personnel must be respected and protected.²⁵⁶ The same protections apply to civilians in the course of responding to appeals from the authorities to perform civil defense functions, even though they are not formal members of civilian civil defense organizations. Objects used for civil defense purposes may not be destroyed or diverted from their proper use. The protection to which civil defense organizations and personnel are entitled shall not cease unless they commit, outside of their proper tasks, acts harmful to the enemy.²⁵⁷

Because there is no evidence that the Lebanese civil defense committed any acts “harmful to the enemy,”²⁵⁸ or that hostile acts had taken place from their installations, the attack on the civil defense building and its personnel constitutes a serious violation of international humanitarian law. The building was marked with a sign outside indicating that the civil defense had its offices there. A high-ranking civil defense official told Human Rights Watch that the building was not marked on the roof with the internationally recognized distinctive sign for civil defense, an equilateral blue triangle on an orange background.²⁵⁹

The IDF has stated that it targeted “the headquarters of the [Hezbollah] organization in Tyre.” ²⁶⁰ This assertion is contradicted by witnesses interviewed by Human Rights Watch and field visits by Human Rights Watch researchers.

Killing of 12 Civilians, including Seven Canadian-Lebanese Dual Nationals, in `Aitaroun, July 16

At 5:50 p.m. on July 16, an Israeli warplane fired missiles into two homes in `Aitaroun, located just one kilometer north of the Israel-Lebanon border, killing 12 members of the al-Akhrass family. Among the dead were seven Canadian-Lebanese dual nationals who were residents of Montreal, but had arrived in their ancestral village of `Aitaroun for their summer holiday just 12 days before the Israeli offensive began.²⁶¹ A woman who lived 300 meters away from the al-Akhrass homes described the attack to Human Rights Watch:

For the first two days after the kidnapping of the [Israeli] soldiers, we heard planes and bombs, but there was no attack on the village. Starting on the third day, they started bombing the field around `Aitaroun. We could hear the bombs fall, and they were starting fires in the fields. There was a family from Canada; they had come just a few days before the war. They were in the kitchen hiding when a bomb hit their house. It was around 6 or 7 p.m. We suddenly heard a plane flying low; it dropped a rocket, and there was a big explosion, with rubble flying in the air. We were only about 300 meters away. People ran towards the house to try and save them, but they only found parts of bodies … When we tried to save them, a helicopter would appear in the sky and a warplane would fly around. So we got scared and stayed away. We recovered between six and eight bodies, but we were told there may be more, and they were all in pieces. The shaikh buried them immediately. There were young women among them.²⁶²

Twelve people died in the attack: `Ali Hassan al-Akhrass, 36, who worked as a pharmacist in Montreal; his wife Amira, 24; and their four children Saya, 7, Zainab, 6, Ahmad, 3, and Salam, 1; and another woman, Haniya al-Akhrass, 55, all Canadian-Lebanese dual nationals. Also killed were four elderly relatives and a young woman, who were all residents of `Aitaroun: Fuda al-Akhrass, 63; `Ali Ahmad al-Akhrass, 65; Muhammad al-Akhrass, 86; Hassan al-Akhrass, 85; and Manal Rislan, 17.²⁶³ All were buried as civilians, and Hezbollah did not claim any of the al-Akhrass dead as fighters or martyrs. Two seriously wounded members of the al-Akhrass family were taken to Canada for medical treatment: Fatima al-Akhrass, 58, lost an eye in the attack, and Ahmad Hassan al-Akhrass, 30, suffered severe burns on his body.

Survivors of the al-Akhrass family said that no one in the family had any links to Hezbollah, and that there were no Hezbollah members or weapons in the vicinity of the house at the time of attack. A family member explained:

We are not involved with the resistance, we are business people. We don’t get engaged in politics; we just try and make money. None of our houses were rented out to Hezbollah, because our family has money so we don’t need to rent out our apartments. And no one was passing in the area when the attack took place; there was no Hezbollah presence.²⁶⁴

Three villagers interviewed separately by Human Rights Watch also said that the al-Akhrass family had no connection to Hezbollah. They also denied that Hezbollah was active in the vicinity of the house or inside the village at the time of the attack. “There was no presence of the [Hezbollah] resistance inside the village,” one witness said, “The positions of the resistance are around the village, not inside the village.”²⁶⁵ A second witness told Human Rights Watch: “I don’t know why their house was targeted, because there was no resistance there.”²⁶⁶ A third villager explained that while `Aitaroun was right on the frontlines, Hezbollah was not firing from within the village itself at the time of the attack.²⁶⁷

`Aitaroun villagers interviewed after the war told Human Rights Watch that on the night of the attack on the al-Akhrass home, Hezbollah was firing only from the outskirts of `Aitaroun. According to these witnesses, Hezbollah did not begin firing from inside the village until around 10:15 p.m. on July 17 (see case below), a day after the attack on the al-Akhrass home.²⁶⁸

According to the Erlich report, Hezbollah fired 18 rockets from within `Aitaroun houses during the war.²⁶⁹ However, there is no evidence that the al-Akhrass home was one of these houses.

The Israeli government expressed its regret over the deaths and said that “Israel was fighting Hizbullah and attacking its targets, and was being as careful as possible not to hurt innocent civilians.”²⁷⁰

Killing of Nine Civilians in `Aitaroun following Hezbollah Rocket Fire, July 18

On July 18, at 12:45 a.m., an Israeli air strike hit two homes in the center of `Aitaroun, killing nine members of the `Awada family.²⁷¹ According to surviving members of the family, Hezbollah fighters had been firing rockets at Israel from approximately 100 to 150 meters away from their home a few hours earlier, at around 10:15 p.m. Some of the members of the `Awada family had already abandoned another home on the outskirts of `Aitaroun, because Hezbollah had been firing rockets from nearby that home:

Two days before the attack, [an `Awada family member] saw Hezbollah firing rockets from 50 meters away from her house, which is on the outskirts of the village. She saw them setting up the rockets and launching them from 50 meters away. She then fled her house and came to the house in the center of the village because she thought it would be safer there.…

The night of the attack, Hezbollah was firing from inside the village. They should have stayed out of the village, not fire from inside. The men of the town should have talked to the fighters .… From 100 or 150 meters away from our house, from inside the village, they were firing rockets. At 10:15 p.m., they were firing rockets from near our house. We heard the missiles going out.²⁷²

“We were sleeping; it was about 12:45 at night. Some were in the shelter, but we were in our home,” said Manal Hassan `Alawiyya, a neighbor “Suddenly we heard a plane flying low. The plane dropped a bomb, and all the windows in our house were blown out. My fiancé took me down to the shelter, and he went to help the people at the house.”²⁷³

Nine members of the `Awada family were killed in the strike: Hassan Mahmud, age 43, a shoemaker and clothes shop owner; his son Hussain, three; his sister Jamila, 45; his sister’s husband, Musa, 45, a schoolteacher; and their five children `Ali, 17; `Abir, 16; Hassan, 12; Maryam, 10; and Muhammad, six. Thirteen other occupants of the home survived the strike, including six children and five women. None of the people in the house had any connection to Hezbollah.

According to the `Awada family, most of the civilians fled `Aitaroun after Hezbollah began to fire rockets from inside the village and the deadly Israeli air strike on their home: “When our house was hit, almost all of the civilians left the village. Hezbollah continued to fire rockets from inside the village.”²⁷⁴

Killing of Three Civilians in Tallousa, July 18

At about 9 a.m. on July 18, Israeli war planes attacked the home of the mukhtar of Tallousa, a village located some 20 kilometers east of Tyre.²⁷⁵ The strike surprised the family while they were about to sit down for breakfast, and partially destroyed the home. The attack killed three persons: the mother of the mukhtar, Bahiyya Sulaiman Turmus, 80; `Ali Nabil Turmus, 20, who suffered from a serious birth defect and was unable to walk or work; and Basil `Imad Turmus, seven, a Brazilian-Lebanese dual national who was on summer vacation in the village when the war broke out.²⁷⁶ All three are buried in the village as civilians, and Hezbollah has not claimed them as martyrs.

Although the family and the villagers all claim that the mukhtar and his family had no connections to Hezbollah, further Human Rights Watch research puts this claim in doubt. According to a witness interviewed by Human Rights Watch, the mukhtar’s son, `Adil, previously had been a Hezbollah combatant, was captured by Israel, and was part of a prisoner exchange between Hezbollah and Israel prior to the war. `Adil had learned Hebrew in Israeli prison and began working for Hezbollah’s al-Manar television after his release. However, `Adil was not in the village at the time of the attack, and there does not appear to have been a Hezbollah presence inside the home at the time of the attack.<sup>277</sup> In any event, even if `Adil had been present in the village, he would not necessarily have been a legitimate military target, as there is no evidence that he was taking direct part in the hostilities or was an active member of the Hezbollah militia.

Killing of One Civilian, Yatar, July 18

At about 4 p.m. on July 17, Israeli warplanes bombed and destroyed eight homes in the village of Yatar. Seven of the homes were empty at the time of the attack, but in the eighth home, the air strike killed Hussain Slim, a 26-year-old severely handicapped man who was bedridden and unable to sit, walk, or talk. His mother Munira Salih, 55, a widow, had just left the home 10 minutes before the strike and returned to find her home destroyed and her handicapped son buried under the rubble, where his remains would not be recovered until two days after the war. According to Munira, only she and her son remained in the neighborhood; the other houses in the area had been vacated since the beginning of the war. She had not seen any Hezbollah fighters or weapons in the area of the home, which is in a different neighborhood than the one where Israel killed three Hezbollah members in an air strike (see above).²⁷⁸ Hussain is buried as a civilian, and Hezbollah has not claimed him as a “martyr.”

Killing of Eight Civilians, Sil`a, July 19

At about 2 a.m. on the morning of July 19, Israeli warplanes carried out a number of bombing raids on the village of Sil`a, destroying many homes. Zainab Ayyoub, 69, a relative who lived in one of the homes attacked in the raid, related what had happened to Human Rights Watch:

The evening before, we were sitting outside around a table. At around 10 p.m., an Apache helicopter came. My brother’s son said, “Let’s go inside.” There was no electricity since the start of the war, so we used candles. When the Apache arrived, we went inside the house, closed the doors and blew out the candle. Around 11 or 11:30 p.m., we went to sleep.…

Around 2 a.m., the aerial strikes began all over the neighborhood … The bombing became stronger; all of the windows in our house were broken. We went down screaming in fear, I came down and saw a window had fallen on my brother’s son and he was wounded in his arms. My brother’s legs were also wounded and bleeding.

I asked where to go, and he said let’s go in the bathroom. All four of us went into the bathroom. We waited there until the raid ended, afraid the house would be destroyed and we would all die. It lasted for about an hour. All of the doors were blown open, and we couldn’t open the gate easily; it was stuck because of the rubble .… Around 3:30 a.m., [the village] was just a huge pile of rubble.²⁷⁹

Eight people died in the strikes. Five died in the home of Mustafa Ayyoub, age 69, a farmer: Mustafa himself, his wife `Aliye, 57, his sister Zainab, 50, her husband, Mustafa Na`im, 60, and a neighbor, Deeb Na`im, 65. Three died in the home of Nizam Ayyoub, 25, a car mechanic: Nizam himself, his wife Jamile, 20, and their son Ahmad, age one.

According to the villagers, none had any relations with Hezbollah. According to Zainab Ayyoub, who survived the attack: “Nizam was not involved with the resistance. I swear to God, none had any relationship with the resistance. The old people also had nothing to do with the resistance.”²⁸⁰ All eight victims were buried as civilians, and none has been claimed by Hezbollah as a “martyr.” According to the four villagers interviewed by Human Rights Watch, there was no Hezbollah presence in the village at the time of the attack.²⁸¹

Killing of 17 Militants and Five Civilians, Srifa, July 19

Around 3:30 a.m. on July 19, at least three Israeli warplanes struck at least 13 homes in the “Moscow” neighborhood of Srifa, firing multiple missiles and collapsing the homes. “At 3:30 a.m., the attacks started,” said Qassim Mustafa Nazal, a resident. “We suddenly heard bombs, one hit, then two hits at the same time, overall between 12 to 16 rockets hit the Moscow neighborhood.”²⁸²

Rescue workers were unable to reach the village and recover the bodies during the war, and continuing strikes by Israeli warplanes and helicopters prevented the local villagers from recovering the bodies themselves. During the war, Human Rights Watch researchers separately interviewed six Srifa residents and briefly visited the site of the strikes on July 31, during the two-day interim ceasefire. During that visit, while shellfire continued around the village, we found no evidence of Hezbollah activity or weapons in the area. The villagers we interviewed all stated that those killed in the attack were civilians, not Hezbollah fighters, and that the neighborhood that had been hit was not a Hezbollah neighborhood. The only visible body under the wreckage, that of an elderly woman, seemed to confirm their testimony. After this preliminary investigation, Human Rights Watch reported in Fatal Strikes that an estimated 26 civilians had been killed in Srifa. This allegation turned out to be wrong.²⁸³

When Human Rights Watch returned to Srifa after the war, on September 18, 2006, the relatives of the dead immediately stated that the majority of those who had been killed were armed local militants from Hezbollah, Amal, and the Lebanese Communist Party, who had been preparing to resist an incursion by Israeli forces into the village.

Among the homes hit were three separate homes in which Hezbollah, Amal, and Lebanese Communist Party fighters were living. The strike on the home where the Amal fighters were living killed two civilians, Kamal Diab Jaber, 53 (the owner of the house) and his mother Manahil Najdi, 80, and six armed Amal militants: Kamal’s three sons Mahmud, 33, `Ali, 30, and Ahmad, 27, as well as Bilal Hamudi, 27, `Ali Za`rour, 30, and `Ali Nazel, 28. At the Hezbollah house, the strike killed four Hezbollah militants (no civilians were present in this house): Hisham Hamudi, 26-28, Wasim Najdi, 28, `Imad Jaber, 27, and `Ali Najdi, 26. Two Hezbollah militants survived the air strike, but an Israeli drone-fired missile later killed them as they attempted to flee the scene of the attack: Fadi Kamaluddin, 29, and Muhammad Kamaluddin, 20. At the house of the Lebanese Communist Party fighters, four armed Communist Party militants died, together with four unarmed persons. The armed Communist Party militants were Ahmad Najdi, 37, Muhammad Najdi, 27, `Ali Najdi, 27, and Hassan Krayim, 24. The unarmed persons in the same house were `Abbas Amin Dakrub, 20, `Abbas Mahmud Dakrub, 25, `Ali Haidar, 20, and `Ali Hassan Sabra, 17. The Communist Party has claimed only the four armed party members as “martyrs,” suggesting the other four persons who died in the home were civilians.²⁸⁴

Human Rights Watch regrets the serious inaccuracy in its initial Fatal Strikes report, concluding that those killed in Srifa were civilians, not fighters. In researching this report we have sought to safeguard against such errors by reinvestigating all of the cases described in Fatal Strikes and seeking out additional sources and types of evidence. We have sought to corroborate all witness testimonies with extensive site inspections and visits to graveyards to establish whether victims were civilians or combatants, and an exhaustive media search to check for any inconsistencies. The militants killed in Srifa were buried as military “martyrs,” not civilians.

Killing of Seven Civilians, Nabi Sheet (Beka` Valley), July 19

At 7:10 a.m. on July 19, an Israeli war plane fired a missile at a two-story building in the village of Nabi Sheet, demolishing the building and killing seven civilians gathered inside. The only survivor of the attack, 21-year-old Bushra Shukr, told Human Rights Watch that her family and their neighbors had been sleeping at the time of the attack: “I was still sleeping at the time. I woke up in the intensive care unit of the hospital with wounds to my stomach and legs.”²⁸⁵

Those killed in the attack were all civilians: Bushra’s mother, Khadija Musawi, 43, and her children Muhammad Hussain Shukr, 23, a law student at Zahle University; Bilal Hussain Shukr, 20, an accountant at a technical college; Talal Hussain Shukr, 18, and Yasin Hussain Shukr, 16, students. Also killed were two neighbors: `Ali Sulaiman Shukr, in his 40s, a carpet salesman, and his wife Hala Shoucair.

All of the victims were buried as civilians, and Hezbollah has not claimed any as fighters or martyrs. Bushra’s father lives in Canada and was not in Lebanon during the summer. According to the surviving sister, “None of my brothers were in Hezbollah … None of the apartments [in the building] had any Hezbollah people.”²⁸⁶ She was not aware of any weapons in any of the other apartments.

A pro-Hezbollah businessman in Nabi Sheet told Human Rights Watch that the family had no relationship to Hezbollah: “Everyone in Nabi Sheet is with Hezbollah in principle. But none of the people killed had any active role in Hezbollah, not on the military side or on the political side.”²⁸⁷

The IDF has offered no explanation for the strike on the Shukr home. Bushra’s uncle, Bilal Shukr, was a Hezbollah fighter but he died in the mid-1980s fighting in southern Lebanon.²⁸⁸ Khadija Musawi was also a close relative of Abbas al-Musawi, the Hezbollah secretary-general assassinated by Israel in February 1992, but she herself had no role in Hezbollah.

Killing of Four Civilians, `Ainata, July 19

On July 19, taxi driver Musa Darwish and two relatives drove some villagers to safety in Tyre, returning with a load of bread for the remaining villagers of `Ainata. They returned to `Ainata around 11:30 a.m. and distributed the bread among the villagers, before returning home shortly after noon to watch television.²⁸⁹ About 15 minutes after the men returned home, an Israeli warplane attacked, first firing a missile into a nearby olive grove and then firing a missile directly at the home, demolishing the structure. Four family members were killed: the taxi driver Musa Darwish, 42; his daughter Amal, 16; her cousin Zeynab, 16; and another cousin Salwa Samih Dakrub, 21. Three other family members were wounded. All of the dead were buried as civilians, and Hezbollah has not claimed any of the dead as fighters or “martyrs.”

According to the surviving relatives, Musa Darwish and the others at his house had no links to Hezbollah—they were political supporters of the Amal party—and were not involved in any militant activity. “He was a driver and used to drive people away from the village, and when he came back he used to bring food for us and other villagers,” his niece recalled. She was adamant that there had been no firing of rockets from near their home: “The fighters were not firing from near here… Our families would never accept Hezbollah firing rockets from near our homes.”²⁹⁰ Musa’s brother, `Ali, who was in a house next to the one where Musa died, recalled that “before firing its missiles, the airplane did a low flyover. We thought it was going to hit Hezbollah posts on the hills [outside the village], but the plane turned and came back and hit the house.”<sup>291</sup> The homes are isolated on the outskirts of the village, and there are no neighbors nearby that could have been the target of the attack. `Ali also denied seeing any Hezbollah fighters around the houses.²⁹² It appears that Israeli forces targeted the homes because of the movement of Musa’s taxi in the area.

Killing of Three Civilians, Debbine Marja`youn, July 19

At 7 p.m. on July 19, an Israeli Apache helicopter fired three missiles into the home of Dawood Khaled, 40, in Debbine Marja`youn, located on the outskirts of the southern town of Marja`youn. At the time of the attack, Dawood was on the roof of his house connecting an electrical wire to his neighbor’s generator, while his six children, whose ages were between 14 and one, were inside the house.²⁹³ The helicopter missiles killed Dawood Khaled, 40; his daughter `Abla, nine, and his son Ahmad, age one. His daughters Huda, 13, and Huweida, eight, were gravely injured and remained hospitalized when Human Rights Watch visited the family three-and-a-half months after the attack. All of the dead are buried as civilians.

According to Dawood’s widow, Hamida Khaled, who was uninjured in the attack because she was feeding the family’s cows at the time, the family was not affiliated with Hezbollah or Amal, and there was no Hezbollah missile firing taking place from near the home, which is located on the outskirts of the village. She speculates that the Apache helicopter may have attacked because it spotted her husband on the roof of the house.²⁹⁴ Dawood’s sister, in a separate interview, also told Human Rights Watch that her brother was a farmer who was not involved with Hezbollah, and that Hezbollah was active outside but not inside the village. She told Human Rights Watch that, to her knowledge, there was no Hezbollah military activity near her brother’s home.²⁹⁵

The IDF has offered no explanation for the strike on the Khaled home. According to the Erlich report, a number of rockets were fired from houses in Debbine Marja`youn during the war.²⁹⁶ However, there is no evidence that the Khaled home was used for that purpose, or that rockets were fired close to the house.

Killing of One Civilian, `Aita al-Sha`ab, July 20

At about 6 a.m. on July 20, an Israeli Apache helicopter fired two missiles at a civilian shelter in the village of `Aita al-Sha`ab, located on the Lebanon-Israel border. According to Nehme Rida, 50, 24 civilians were living in the shelter at the time of the attack, all of them civilians. Nehme admitted that his son Muhammad Rida, 24, a Hezbollah fighter who died during the war, used to visit his relatives every two or three days at the shelter. He said that his son was not present at the shelter on the day of the attack.²⁹⁷

According to Nehme, he and his brother, Hassan, 58, had woken up at sunrise to pray and read the Koran, and were sitting just outside the shelter when the attack occurred:

There was continuous artillery fire, fighter jets were flying overhead. We heard three helicopters. They went to the end of the town, and when they came back they attacked. They fired two missiles at us. We were sitting at the door of the shelter. I was injured, and my brother [Hassan] died …. The missile hit a broken-down car in front of us. There were no fighters in the area, nothing. The resistance was inside the village,²⁹⁸ but not in our area.²⁹⁹

Hassan was buried as a civilian, and Hezbollah has not claimed him as a fighter or a “martyr.” The IDF has offered no explanation for the strike on the Rida home.

Killing of Three Civilians, `Aita al-Sha`ab, July 21

At about 2 p.m., an Israeli airplane fired a missile at the home of Rida Rida, an elderly villager in his seventies, demolishing the home and killing all three persons inside. The family had stayed in `Aita al-Sha`ab because Zahra Rida, Rida’s wife who was also in her seventies, was bedridden and could not easily be moved from the home. The Israeli air strike killed Rida, his wife Zahra, and their son Ahmad, who was in his forties. According to a neighbor who was in `Aita al-Sha`ab at the time of the attack but did not witness the strike, Rida “had no sons in the resistance, and there was no one else staying at his house.”³⁰⁰ `Aita al-Sha`ab is the Lebanese border village closest to the site of the July 12 Hezbollah attack and abduction of two IDF soldiers that sparked the war. During the war, the IDF heavily bombarded `Aita al-Sha`ab, which also saw some of the most intense urban combat between IDF ground forces and Hezbollah fighters. As we were unable to locate a surviving witness who was in the vicinity of the home at the time of the air strike, Human Rights Watch was unable to ascertain whether Hezbollah forces were fighting in the vicinity of the home. We can only state with certainty that the three casualties of the attack were buried as civilians, and that no Hezbollah combatants died alongside them.

Killing of Two Hezbollah Fighters and One Elderly Woman, Zebqine, July 21

On July 21, an Israeli air strike killed the Hezbollah commander for Zebqine, Ahmad Bzeih, and his cousin `Adnan Bzeih, also a Hezbollah fighter, while they were checking on 80-year-old Khayriyye Kamil Bzeih at her home. The elderly woman was also killed in the attack.³⁰¹ Hezbollah combatants are legitimate targets for a military strike, even when there is no ground combat taking place at the time of the strike, as was the case in Zebqine. Even if the Hezbollah fighters had a strictly humanitarian motive in visiting Khariyye Bzeih, they endangered the elderly woman by co-mingling with her as combatants.

Killing of One Civilian in Nabi Sheet, July 23

At about 5:30 a.m. on July 23, an Israeli warplane fired two missiles at the home of Dr. Fayez Shukr in Nabi Sheet, in what appears to have been an attempt to assassinate Shukr. Dr. Fayez Shukr is a leading member of the Lebanese Ba`ath Party, which is politically allied with Hezbollah, and was a Minister of State in 1995-1996.<sup>302</sup> However, there is no evidence that Shukr took part in hostilities between Israel and Hezbollah, meaning that he was not a legitimate military target. The attack also destroyed the house next to the Shukr home, and the village hussainiyya [a Shi`a religious building] was damaged. These two structures were empty at the time of the attack.

Dr. Shukr was not at home at the time of the attack, having left his home the night before to return to his office in Beirut. The massive explosion demolished the home, fatally wounding his father, Shehab Fayez Shukr, 71, who died from his wounds soon after being pulled from the rubble. The elderly man was not politically active.³⁰³

Killing of Two Civilians, Shehin, July 23

At about 11 a.m. on July 23, an Israeli air strike destroyed the empty summer home of `Ali `Awada in the village of Shehin, located just south of the Israel-Lebanon border, close to Marwahin. No one was killed in the `Awada home, but the powerful explosion killed two women sitting across the road: Munira Ghaith, 57, and her daughter Raja, 29, a local schoolteacher.³⁰⁴ Muhammad Ghaith, 65, Munira’s husband, who works as a farmer, was seriously wounded in the attack.

According to his neighbors, `Ali `Awada, a father of seven, works as a hotel concierge in Beirut, has no links to Hezbollah, and did not rent out his summer house to anyone.³⁰⁵ According to the same neighbor, “there was no resistance in the neighborhood, and [the victims] had nothing to do with Hezbollah.”³⁰⁶ The neighbor also told Human Rights Watch that he never saw any weapons being transported to `Awada’s house.³⁰⁷ The two women were buried as civilians.

Killing of Five Civilians in Yaroun, July 23

At 4:15 p.m. on Sunday July 23, an Israeli air strike hit the home of 75-year-old Farhat Farhat in the village of Yaroun, located two kilometers north of the Israel-Lebanon border, completely destroying Farhat’s home and five adjacent, empty homes. The air strike killed all five persons in Farhat’s home: Farhat, 75; his wife Badiya Sa`ab, 70; their daughter-in-law Zainab Khanafer, 43, and Zainab’s two children, Zahra, age five, and Dana, six months old. All of the victims were buried as civilians in Yaroun.³⁰⁸

According to Farhat’s neighbor Rashad Ja`far, who was at home and had 45 civilians sheltering in his home at the time of the attack, there was no Hezbollah military activity connected with the Farhat house:

The Israelis hit the house out of ignorance. People were coming in and out of the house, and the Israeli drone must have seen this. This is the only explanation as to why they hit the home, because Farhat is an old man. He has eight kids, and they all live overseas .… There were no weapons [and] we didn’t see any Katyushas [rockets] being fired from our area.³⁰⁹

The IDF has offered no explanation for the strike on the Farhat home.

Killing of 11 Civilians in al-Hallousiye, July 24

At about 5:45 a.m. on July 24, Israeli warplanes mounted a massive strike on a series of homes in the center of al-Hallousiye village, located some 10 kilometers northeast of the coastal city of Tyre. The warplanes carried out several bombing raids on the targeted neighborhood, destroying between seven and 10 buildings, including a three-story building, and killing 11 civilians.

According to several survivors interviewed by Human Rights Watch, hundreds of civilians from al-Hallousiye had fled to the neighborhood in the belief that it was safer, abandoning their homes on the outskirts of the villages because of Israeli shelling and bombing raids around the village. Muhammad Mu’anis, a 36-year-old farmer who lost his 12-year-old son and nine-year-old daughter in the attack, explained to Human Rights Watch: “We thought it would be safer there, because the Israelis were attacking the homes on the outskirts of the village. At the center of the village, we had some 250 people, many of them children—all of the houses were full with people.”³¹⁰ Although they considered the center of the village to be safer, not everyone believed that the center of the village would not be struck. Some of the families even decided to split up between different houses, according to the village shaikh, who lost his wife and four children in the attack: “We were expecting the Israelis to hit the civilians, so we decided to split up the families, so if the attack occurred in one place, some of the families would survive.”³¹¹

The Israeli air strike first hit a home with 18 civilians inside, killing two persons and wounding the 16 survivors. When the Israeli warplanes returned for additional bombing raids minutes later, they demolished a large three-story building where some 45 civilians had gathered, believing that the large building would survive even in case of an attack. Nine civilians were killed when the three-story building was attacked. Out of the 11 dead in the two raids, five were children, five were women, and the only man was 69 years old. The victims, all buried as civilians, were Maryam Hamid, age 45, the wife of the village shaikh, and her four children: Zainab, 22, `Ali, 13, `Abbas, nine, and Khadija, six; Khalthoum Hajali, 86, her daughter Nahiya Mu’anis, 65, and her granddaughter Ibtisam Hamid, 45; Muhammad Mu’anis, 12, and his sister `Atika Mu’anis, 9; and Anise Saloum, 69. None of the dead were claimed as martyrs or fighters by Hezbollah.³¹²

The villagers all said that there was no Hezbollah presence in the attacked neighborhood, located at the center of the village. Muhammad Mu’anis, who lost two children in the attack, told Human Rights Watch: “There were no Hezbollah fighters there with us. You can talk to anyone in our village; there were no fighters with us.”³¹³ Shaikh Muhammad Hamid, the village spiritual leader who is not affiliated with Hezbollah and lost his wife and four children in the attack, was equally adamant: “Not a single resistance [Hezbollah] fighter was in the village; they were all outside the village …. The resistance fires from outside the village, not from inside the village. There were no fighters in those homes, or around the homes. Hezbollah and Amal are from the people, but there were no military centers or any fighters in that area .… These are our homes, and we want to protect them.”³¹⁴ The Erlich report, which reviewed intelligence data that radar-tracked rocket launchers in southern Lebanon, does not mention rockets fired from within the village of al-Hallousiye, or any other Hezbollah-related activity.³¹⁵

Killing of Four Hezbollah Fighters and Eight Civilians in Two Separate Strikes, Haris, July 24

At about 5 p.m., two air strikes 10 minutes apart targeted two homes located 100 meters apart on the same street in the village of Haris. The first strike hit a home where four Hezbollah fighters were having a meeting, killing all of them. The second strike 10 minutes later demolished a home with only civilians inside, killing all eight members of a family.

The first strike apparently hit a home where four members of a Hezbollah fighting unit were meeting, killing the commander of the unit, Musa Zalghut “Bakr,” 40, and three fighters in the unit: Shadi Muhammad al-Rez “Malak,” 21, Muhammad Ahmad Rizaq “Hadi,” 25, and Muhammad Wafiq Daqiq “Sajid,” 19. All four are buried in Haris as Hezbollah fighters.³¹⁶ There were no civilians inside the home used by the Hezbollah militants.

Ten minutes later, the Israeli warplane carried out a second strike on a home just 100 meters down the street from the home of the Hezbollah fighters. The second home attacked was occupied solely by civilians, and eight civilians were killed: Khalil Jawad, 77; his wife Zainab Jawad, 63; his daughter Rawa’ Jawad, 33; his daughter-in-law Nazmiye Yahya, 50, and her four children Ahmad, 26, Mahmud, 20, `Akil, 18, and Batul, 16. All of the victims of the second strike were buried as civilians, and none have been claimed by Hezbollah as fighters or “martyrs.” According to the villagers, there was no Hezbollah military presence in the second house targeted.³¹⁷ The Hezbollah military presence in the populated neighborhood endangered the civilians in the area, in violation of the legal duty to take all feasible precautions to spare civilians the hazards of war. However, the presence of armed Hezbollah militants in a civilian neighborhood did not absolve Israel of the duty to distinguish between combatants and civilians, and to target only the former.

Killing of 15 Civilians and Two Wounded Hezbollah Fighters, `Ainata, July 24

At about noon on July 24, an Israeli air strike demolished a home at the center of `Ainata, killing 15 civilians and two wounded Hezbollah fighters sheltering in an internal room.

According to relatives, two wounded Hezbollah fighters fled from the frontline fighting and came to the house of 34-year-old Fayez Khanafer in `Ainata. Fayez attempted to provide the wounded fighters with some first aid and to evacuate them to Saida, but could not find a driver willing to take them. On the morning of July 24, Fayez moved the wounded fighters and his entire family to the home of Muhammad `Ali Khanafer in the center of `Ainata. A few hours after Fayez moved into the home, it was struck by Israeli missiles and destroyed.

Fifteen civilians died inside the home, as well as the two wounded fighters. The 15 civilian dead were: Fayez Khanafer, 34, his wife Rima Samhat, 35, and their four children `Ali, age seven, Abdullah, six, Muhammad, three, and Dumu`, two; Maryam Fadlallah, 55, and her daughter Zahra, 17; Yemene Fadlallah, 40, and her son Khodr, age four; Almaza Hassan Fadlallah, 77; Zainab Khanafer, 78; `Afifa Khanafer, 50; Muhammad `Ali Wehbi, 82, and Kamila Khanafer, 61. The two Hezbollah fighters who died were Ahmad Jagbir, 19, from Bar`ashit village, and Muhammad `Atwe, 24, from Chakra village.³¹⁸

Some of the 15 civilians who died in the bombing had links to Hezbollah, but could not be considered combatants as they did not take an active part in the hostilities. Fayez Khanafer, while not a member of Hezbollah, had provided shelter and first aid to the two wounded Hezbollah fighters who came to his home. Maryam Fadlallah was a Hezbollah activist (her son Amir had been killed in Bint Jbeil while fighting for Hezbollah). Both Maryam and her daughter Zahra decided to stay behind in `Ainata in part to bake bread for Hezbollah fighters, according to their relatives.³¹⁹ None of the civilians could be considered directly participating in the hostilities as defined by international humanitarian law, and thus could not be targets of attack.

The Hezbollah fighters, being wounded and evidently not participating in the fighting, would be considered hors de combat (outside the fighting) and thus not a valid target of attack. As one laws of war expert has written with respect to the protection of wounded soldiers on the battlefield, “it is only those who either stop fighting, or are prevented by their wounds from fighting, who are protected. Those who carry on fighting despite their wounds … are not protected from attack.”³²⁰ The IDF Laws of War in the Battlefield states: “The wounded are regarded as persons who have stopped taking part in the fighting and they shall not be harmed.”³²¹

Even if the IDF believed it could lawfully attack the wounded combatants (or failed to realize their hors de combat status), it should have taken into account the likely civilian casualties of attacking them in a civilian home in determining whether the military gain of attacking them there outweighed the civilian harm.

Killing of Four UN Observers, Khiam, July 25

Around 7:30 p.m. on July 25, an Israeli precision-guided missile directly hit the clearly marked and well-known observer post of the UN’s Observer Group Lebanon (OGL) near Khiam, demolishing a three-story building at the base and killing four unarmed United Nations Truce Supervision Organization (UNTSO) observers. The observers killed were Lt. Col. Du Zhaoyu, 34, from China; Lt. Cdr. Jarno Mäkinen, 20, of Finland; Major Paeta Derek Hess-von Kruedener, 43, of Canada; and Major Hans-Peter Lang, 44, of Austria.

The attack on the post came after 14 Israeli aerial bombs and artillery shells had fallen nearby, the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) said.³²² There was no Hezbollah presence or firing near the UN position during the period of the attack. According to the United Nations, the UN Force Commander in southern Lebanon, General Alain Pelligrini, was in “repeated contact with Israeli Army officers throughout the afternoon, pressing the need to protect that particular UN position from firing.”³²³

In a statement issued immediately after the attack, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan expressed shock at the “apparently deliberate targeting” of the “clearly marked UN observer post.” He called it a “coordinated artillery and aerial attack” and urged Israel to conduct an investigation.³²⁴

Israel expressed “deep regret” over the incident and rejected allegations it had deliberately targeted the UN post.³²⁵ Prime Minister Olmert promised to conduct a thorough investigation. “It is inconceivable for the UN to define an error as an apparently deliberate action,” he said.³²⁶ Secretary-General Annan accepted the Israeli government’s assurance that the attack was not deliberate but regretted that Israel would not allow the UN to participate in the investigation.³²⁷ After a UN Board of Inquiry conducted its own limited investigation, a terse statement issued by the Secretary-General noted the lack of cooperation received from the IDF: “The Board did not have access to operational or tactical level IDF commanders involved in the incident, and was, therefore, unable to determine why the attacks on the UN position were not halted, despite repeated demarches to the Israeli authorities from UN personnel, both in the field and at Headquarters.”³²⁸

This was the first deadly attack on UN observers in southern Lebanon during the 2006 conflict, but Israeli forces had struck at or near other clearly marked UN positions since the beginning of the fighting. Hezbollah had regularly (and, in all likelihood, unlawfully) fired at Israeli targets from near UN positions, but in many cases (including the deadly Khiam attack) Israeli fire struck UN posts in the absence of any Hezbollah presence.

On July 24, four Ghanaian UNIFIL observers were lightly injured when an Israeli tank shell fell inside their UN post at Rmeish, one of six incidents of IDF fire on or close to UN positions recorded that day (UNIFIL did not report a Hezbollah presence near the Rmeish UN post that day).³²⁹ On July 16, UNIFIL recorded 17 instances of IDF fire on UN observer posts, including two direct hits inside UNIFIL observer posts. One IDF tank shell seriously wounded an Indian peacekeeper inside a UN post.³³⁰ On July 17, a UNIFIL medical team came under IDF fire while trying to retrieve the bodies of 16 civilians killed by an Israeli strike on the road between al-Biyada and Sham`a as they fled the village of Marwahin (see below).³³¹ Even if Hezbollah was in the area of the UN during these attacks, the IDF apparently did not take adequate care to avoid harm to UN personnel and installations.

The magnitude of IDF attacks that hit close to UN positions in southern Lebanon is well documented in UNIFIL’s own daily reports. UNIFIL’s summary of attacks on its positions on July 19, for example, gives a troubling overview of just how often Israeli shells landed on their positions, as well as the actions of Hezbollah fighters that endangered UNIFIL personnel:

There were 31 incidents of firing close to UN positions during the past 24 hours, with three positions suffering direct hits from the Israeli side. 10 artillery shells impacted inside the UN position of the Ghanaian battalion on the coast of Ras Naqoura, causing extensive damage. Four artillery shells impacted inside the patrol base of the Observer Group Lebanon in the Marun el Ras area, including three direct impacts on the building which caused extensive damage and cut electricity and communications connections. At the time of the shelling, there were 36 civilians inside the position, most of whom were women and children from the village of Marun el Ras. There were no casualties. One artillery shell impacted inside the UNIFIL Headquarters compound in Naqoura, causing extensive damage and danger to the UNIFIL hospital where doctors were operating at the time. Splinters of artillery shells also damaged the boundary wall of the Naqoura camp. Extensive shelling damage was reported in the Ghanaian battalion position south of Alma Ash Shab. Hezbollah firing was also reported from the immediate vicinity of UN positions in the Naqoura and Marun el Ras areas at the time of the incidents.³³²

Peacekeeping forces are not parties to a conflict, even if they are usually professional soldiers. As long as they do not take part in hostilities, they are entitled to the same protection from attack afforded to civilians. ³³³ Thus deliberate or indiscriminate attacks on peacekeepers are a violation of international humanitarian law. The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court has explicitly included intentionally directing attacks on peacekeeping personnel as a war crime.³³⁴

Killing of Two Civilians, Kafra, July 26

At about 4 p.m. on July 26, Israeli warplanes hit several neighboring homes in Kafra, located 10 kilometers southeast of the coastal town of Tyre. Ayyad Merhi, 48, a van driver who survived the attack, explained that he had stayed in the village to look after his elderly parents, since his mother was bedridden and could not be moved, and his father refused to leave his native village. He told Human Rights Watch how the attack occurred:

On that Wednesday, things had been quiet. We were sitting around in safety. The first hit that day came on the [empty] house of Ahmad and `Ali Hijazi, who are our neighbors. Then, they attacked the house of our neighbor, Muhammad Musa `Ez al-Din. It was around 4 p.m. I went to see my van; a tree had fallen on it. Seven or eight minutes later, they attacked our house from upstairs. There was smoke. I went outside to get some air. The second hit was in the middle of the house. I had time to jump into the garden in front of the house. They also hit my brother’s house, which is next to ours. I sat under a fig tree until things got quieter. I called out for my parents, but there was no answer.³³⁵

The attack killed his father Muhammad Merhi, 78, and his mother Latifah Abu Zayd, 72. Both are buried as civilians in Kafra.³³⁶

According to Ayyad Mustafa, there were no Hezbollah military operations nearby: “Hezbollah was not firing from close to the house; their rockets were coming from the valleys.”³³⁷ The other four destroyed homes were all empty, as the families had fled to Beirut. The attack was the first IDF strike on the village of Kafra.

The IDF has offered no explanation for the strike. According to a report compiled by the IDF-affiliated Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center, Hezbollah fired 17 rockets from within houses in Kafra during the war.³³⁸ However, there is no evidence that the firing came from near the Merhi home or that Hezbollah fired rockets from the village on July 26.

Killing of Six Civilians, Hadatha, July 27

At 3:30 p.m. on July 27, Israeli warplanes fired missiles at an abandoned women’s Shi`a religious center (a hussainiyya) in Hadatha, located some 15 kilometers southeast of the coastal city of Tyre. According to the mukhtar of the village, the abandoned religious center was not affiliated with Hezbollah. After hitting the center, the planes returned and demolished an adjacent three-story home. Hajj `Abd al-Jalil Nasir, 73, the former mukhtar of the village who was at his home just 50 meters away, recalled the attack to Human Rights Watch:

We felt like an earthquake had happened. Every person who stayed in my house thought we had been targeted ourselves. We knew there were people in that house because all of the villagers were sheltering in the houses with more than two stories [for safety.]

When the bombing calmed down, we went to see what happened. We saw the house and the hussainiyya completely destroyed. The dead remained under the rubble until the end of the war.³³⁹

Those killed in the attack were Mustafa Nasir, 80; his sister Naimeh, 60, and her husband Hussain Sabra, 58; Yusif Mansur, 73, and his wife Zainab Sabra, 75, and their daughter Samia Mansur 50. All were buried as civilians in Hadatha.³⁴⁰

The former mukhtar of Hadatha, Hajj `Abd al-Jalil Nasir, who remained in his village until the 48-hour ceasefire and is not associated with Hezbollah, told Human Rights Watch that Hezbollah fighters had been prohibited from entering his village and had fought from existing positions in the surrounding valleys:

At the time I was present in the village, the resistance was not inside the village. The villagers do not allow the resistance to shoot from inside the village; they had to go outside the village. The fighters made a lot of caves where they could hide [around the village]. They have a Land Rover with 8-12 missile launchers mounted on it, and their caves are at least two meters deep. When they launch, they move the vehicle out and back in. So the missile launcher stays in the field. It is prohibited to bring such weapons into the village. The villagers do not allow it because it would bring a catastrophe on them.³⁴¹

The Erlich Report, which radar-tracked rocket launchers in southern Lebanon, does not mention any rockets fired from within the village of Hadatha.³⁴²

Killing of Six Civilians, al-Numeiriyya, July 29

At about 2:30 p.m. on July 29, `Adnan Harake, age 43, a 20-year veteran of the Lebanese Civil Defense, briefly left his home in al-Numeiriyya to go buy bread and other food supplies in the center of the village. When he returned 30 minutes later, he found that Israeli warplanes had reduced his home to rubble, killing his second wife and four children as well as a neighbor. “I left a nice house and my family,” Harake told Human Rights Watch, “and a few minutes later I returned to a pile of rubble.”

Six people were killed in the attack: Harake’s second wife Sawsan Mehdi, 30; and his children Ranim, 17; `Ali, 13; Rida, 11; and Hadi, age eight; as well as his neighbor Naif Abdullah Bdeir, 56. All were buried in al-Numeiriyya village as civilians, and none were claimed by Hezbollah as fighters or “martyrs.”

Al-Numeiriyya is a small village located about half-way between the coastal cities of Tyre and Saida and the inland city of Nabatiye, too far away from the Israeli border to serve as a launching site for short-range rockets. The house was located along the main road out of al-Numeriyya towards Dweir, and had a small agricultural supplies shop on the bottom floor; the apartment of Naif Abdullah Bdeir, a real estate agent without Hezbollah affiliation, on the first floor; and Harake’s apartment on the second floor. According to Harake, a neighboring building was empty and unused at the time of the attack. According to Harake, there was no Hezbollah presence, rockets, or weapons nearby: “We didn’t have a missile launcher, nothing of the sort, no [Hezbollah] flags, nothing. It was just a normal house. Me and my neighbor, we had nothing to do with Hezbollah …. The second building was empty. They may have seen people moving; maybe that is why the attacked. There were no trucks parked nearby.”³⁴³

Killing of 27 Civilians, Qana, July 30

Around 1 a.m. on July 30, Israeli warplanes fired missiles at the village of Qana. Among the homes struck was a three-story building in which 63 members of two extended families had sought shelter. The home collapsed and killed 27 people, including 16 children.

Initial reports after the attack put the death toll at 54, which was based on the register of 63 persons who had sought shelter in the building that was struck, and the rescue teams’ ability to locate only nine survivors. Relying on multiple interviews with rescuers and village officials as well as media accounts, Human Rights Watch issued a press release on July 30 that also put the death toll at “at least 54 civilians.” But a Human Rights Watch inspection of the Qana site and our interviews conducted at the Tyre hospital on August 1 and 2 established that the actual death toll of the attack was lower. Human Rights Watch learned after a visit to Qana that at least 22 people escaped the basement; 27 are confirmed dead (a 28^th person from Qana died at the hospital around the same time, but was not in the building that was attacked). No more bodies were recovered since the immediate recovery effort. There is no indication that the rescuers and village officials intentionally attempted to mislead the media and Human Rights Watch researchers by intentionally giving inflated death tolls; rather, an innocent misinterpretation of the register of persons in the building and a lack of due diligence in checking the death count by the media and Human Rights Watch’s researchers are responsible for the error.

Two families had sought shelter in the house because it was one of the larger buildings in the area and had a reinforced basement, according to the deputy mayor of the town, Dr. `Issam Matuni.³⁴⁴

According to Muhammad Mahmud Shalhoub, a 61-year-old farmer who was in the basement during the attack, 63 members of the Shalhoub and Hashim families went to hide in three ground-floor rooms of the three-story building when the first missile struck the village around 6 p.m. on July 29. He explained how, around 1 a.m. on July 30, after heavy bombing in the village, an Israeli missile hit the ground floor of the home:

It felt like someone lifted the house. The ground floor of the house is 2.5 meters high. When the first strike hit, it hit below us and the whole house lifted, the rocket hit under the house. I was sitting by the door. It got very dusty and smoky. We were all in shock. I was not injured and found myself [thrown] outside. There was a lot of screaming inside. When I tried to go back in, I couldn’t see because of the smoke. I started pushing people out, whomever I could find.

Five minutes later, another air strike came and hit the other side of the building, behind us. After the second strike, we could barely breathe and we couldn’t see anything. There were three rooms in the house where people were hiding [on the ground floor]. After the first strike, a lot of earth was pushed up into the rooms. We only managed to find some people [alive] in the first room.³⁴⁵

Shalhoub told Human Rights Watch that there were no Hezbollah fighters present in or near the home when the attack took place. Israeli bombs had cut all four roads into Qana, he said, which would have made it difficult if not impossible for Hezbollah to move rocket launchers into the village. “If they [the IDF] really saw the rocket launchers, where did it go?” Shalhoub said. “We showed Israel our dead; why don’t the Israelis show us the rocket launchers?”

Ghazi `Aydaji, another Qana villager who rushed to the house when it was hit at 1 a.m., gave an account consistent with Shalhoub’s. He and others removed a number of survivors from the building after the first strike, he said, but they could remove no one else after the second strike hit five minutes later. “If Hezbollah was firing near the house, would a family of over 50 people just sit there?” he asked.³⁴⁶

Human Rights Watch researchers visited Qana on July 31, the day after the attack, and did not find any destroyed military equipment in or near the home. None of the dozens of international journalists, rescue workers, and international observers who visited Qana on July 30 and 31 reported seeing any evidence of a Hezbollah military presence in or around the home around the time that it was hit. Rescue workers recovered no bodies of apparent Hezbollah fighters from in or near the building.

After the incident, Israeli officials expressed regret over the civilian deaths and said Israel would conduct an investigation. Various officials said that Hezbollah fighters were to blame for firing rockets near the building, and that the IDF had warned civilians to leave.³⁴⁷ Various Israeli spokespersons gave contradictory statements about the attack: one spokesperson stated that the bombs had missed a Hezbollah target 300 meters away, while another said that the house had been the target because Hezbollah fighters had used the house. Several officials also stated that the second explosion had taken place only hours later, in the early morning hours, and suggested that a Hezbollah rocket stored inside may have caused that explosion. All of these contradictory statements were ultimately not repeated when Israel released the findings of its investigation.

IDF spokesperson Jacob Dallal blamed Hezbollah for the civilian deaths, stating that “Hezbollah used the village of Qana as a base to launch rockets and it bears responsibility that this area is a combat zone,” but not offering any evidence linking the specific building struck to Hezbollah rocket fire.³⁴⁸ An unnamed senior Israeli air commander said the IDF had hit the building with a precision-guided bomb on the assumption that it was sheltering Hezbollah crews that had fired missiles at northern Israel, and denied that the IDF had targeted civilians: “Had we known there were that many civilians inside, we certainly would not have attacked [the house].”³⁴⁹ When asked how the military knew about the rockets but not the presence of civilians in the building, the commander said the IDF was “capable of detecting missile launches because they are very dynamic,” while the civilians were not seen because they had been hiding in the building for some days.³⁵⁰ His statement is contrary to the account of Muhammad Mahmud Shalhoub, above, who said the families went into the house to hide when the aerial attack began around 6 p.m. on July 29, not days before the attack. The IDF has never released any evidence to support the Israeli air commander’s contention that Hezbollah had fired rockets from the area. Nor does the alleged fact of Hezbollah’s use of “the village of Qana as a base to launch rockets” justify a direct attack twice on a civilian building.

On August 1, one of Israel’s top military correspondents wrote in Haaretz that, while the Israeli Air Force investigation into the incident was ongoing, “questions have been raised over military accounts of the incident.” He elaborated that the IDF changed its original story and that “it now appears that the military had no information on rockets launched from the site of the building, or the presence of Hezbollah men at the time.”³⁵¹

According to the lists of the Lebanese Red Cross and the Tyre hospital, as well as a Human Rights Watch visit to the Qana burial site on September 14, 2006, the 27 victims of the Qana bombing were: Husna Hashim, 75; Mahdi Mahmud Hashim, 68; Ibrahim Hashim, 65; Ahmad Mahmud Shalhoub, 55; `Afaf al-Zabad, 45; Nabila `Ali Amin Shalhoub, 40; Tayssir `Ali Shalhoub, 39; Khadija `Ali Yussef, 31; Maryam Hassan Mohsen, 30; Lina Muhammad Mahmud Shalhoub, 30; `Ola Ahmad Mahmud Shalhoub, 25; `Ali Ahmad Mahmud Shalhoub, 17; Hussain Ahmad Hashim, 12; Houra’ Muhammad Qassem Shalhoub, 12; `Ali Muhammad Qassem Shalhoub, 10; Ja`far Mahmud Hashim, 10; Qassem Samih Shalhoub, nine; Yahya Muhammad Qassem Shalhoub, nine; Qassem Muhammad Shalhoub, seven; Raqiteh Mahmud Shalhoub, seven; Ibrahim Ahmad Hashim, seven; Yussef Ahmad Mahmud Shalhoub, six; Zainab Muhammad `Ali Amin Shalhoub, six; Fatima Muhammad Hashim, four; `Ali Ahmad Hashim, three; Zahra’ Muhammad Qassem Shalhoub, two; and `Abbas Ahmad Hashim, nine months.

A mass burial of 30 bodies took place in Qana on August 18. The burial involved all 27 victims of the Qana bombing, as well as three Hezbollah fighters who had been killed outside Qana in fighting unrelated to the bombing (one of the three fighters was buried in a graveyard in a different neighborhood of Qana).³⁵² Only one of the 27 Qana victims—17-year-old `Ali Ahmad Mahmud Shalhoub—was buried with a Hezbollah flag draped over his coffin, a common practice for Hezbollah symphatizers, regardless of whether they are simple supporters, military fighters, or non-military members. According to his relatives, he was a Hezbollah sympathizer, not a Hezbollah fighter, and his grave stone does not identify him as a military “martyr.”³⁵³

Killing of Three Civilians, al-Luweizeh, August 1

At about 4 p.m. on August 1, Israeli warplanes dropped leaflets over the village of al-Luweizeh, located in a mountainous region about 10 kilometers north of Nabatiyeh, stating that they were about to launch an air raid on the village and ordering the villagers to immediately leave their homes and go north.³⁵⁴ While some villagers heeded the warnings, others remained in their homes, reassured by the fact that Israel had declared a 48-hour ceasefire following the Qana incident.

At about 4:50 p.m., 36-year-old Rahab Hashim left her home next to the town’s square, and got into her car to go collect her husband for a late lunch. As she drove away, an Israeli missile struck the home she had just left, demolishing the home and knocking her unconscious. A girl and two women inside the home were killed: Rahab’s 12-year-old daughter Hanadi; Rahab’s sister-in-law Ilham, 38; and Rashida Muqalid, 60, who was bedridden. All three dead were buried as civilians. Three young boys were seriously wounded in the attack, including a 16-year-old who remained in a coma for twelve days.

According to the villagers, the family had no connections to Hezbollah. The owner of the house, who lost his daughter in the attack, works for the Lebanese Red Cross. A neighbor speculated:

I think the house was hit because people were moving around. The sons of the old woman left just before the attack, but they were not resistance fighters …. The people in that house were not pro-Hezbollah. No trucks were parked there, just the pickup of her son who works for the Red Cross. His daughter is one of the dead. He had come to fix the water.³⁵⁵

While humanitarian law requires effective advance warning to the civilian population prior to an attack where circumstances permit, those warnings do not in any way relieve the warring party from its obligations at all times to distinguish between combatants and civilians and to take all feasible precautions to protect civilians from harm. Issuing warnings in no way entitled the Israeli military to treat those civilians who remained in al-Luweizeh as legitimate military targets or to ignore their presence for reasons of distinction and proportionality.

Killing of Two Hezbollah Fighters, One Hospital Nurse, Two Armed Communist Party Members and 11 Civilians, Jamaliyeh and Baalbek, August 1

Starting at about 9:30 p.m. on August 1, hundreds of Israeli commando troops backed by Apache helicopters and war planes launched a major raid on the Hezbollah-aligned Dar al-Hikma Hospital in Jamaliyeh, a village on the outskirts of the city of Baalbek in the Beka` Valley, as well as a separate raid inside Baalbek itself.

According to the IDF, “the target of the raid was a hospital known to be used by the Hezbollah terror organization as one of its headquarters. Hezbollah weapons, computers, computer storage media, and a large amount of vital intelligence materials were seized. Ten terrorists were killed during the operation, and five others were captured by Israeli forces. There were no IDF or civilian casualties.”³⁵⁶ In fact, most of those killed were civilians, including a family of six Syrian Kurdish farm workers, and the captured “terrorists” turned out to be civilians as well. Instead of a “precise surgical raid” claimed by the IDF, the operation appears to have been based on questionable intelligence and had a disproportionate impact on civilians.

The raid started with intensive bombardment of the roads around the Dar al-Hikma hospital between 9:30 and 10:15 p.m., cutting off all the access roads to the hospital. The Israeli commandos were then dropped by helicopters and made their way on foot to the hospital. According to the director of the Dar al-Hikma hospital, the IDF commandos shot dead a nurse at the hospital, Atif Amhaz, as he tried to flee and also wounded two armed security guards. As the commandos took control of the hospital, Hezbollah militants tried to ambush them. Two Hezbollah militants were killed during the ensuing firefight. An Israeli drone hit one with a missile as he approached the hospital, and Israeli small arms fire killed a second after he fired at the Israeli troops. Human Rights Watch saw Hezbollah “martyr” posters for only the nurse and the two Hezbollah militants around Jamaliyeh, suggesting that they were the only three Hezbollah-affiliated persons to die in the commando raid. Others killed, as noted below, were a group of armed men, who were valid military targets, and civilians in their vicinity. Our research does not support the IDF claim that “ten terrorists” were killed. ³⁵⁷

The Israeli commandos searched every room in the hospital, confiscating the hospital files and computer disks, and also reportedly discovered AK-47 rifles and other unspecified small arms at the hospital. They did not take any prisoners. The hospital director freely admitted that his hospital had links to Hezbollah and speculated that the IDF may have carried out the raid because it believed the two kidnapped IDF soldiers were being kept at the hospital, or that the hospital was treating important wounded Hezbollah commanders or officials.³⁵⁸

International humanitarian law provides that parties to a conflict must protect and respect medical units, such as military and civilian hospitals, in all circumstances. They lose their protection if they are used for military purposes outside of their humanitarian function that is “harmful to the enemy.”³⁵⁹ The presence of armed guards or small arms and ammunition taken from the wounded would not be a basis for a hospital losing its protection; using a hospital to store ammunition or shelter able-bodied combatants would be such a basis. Some states specifically prohibit using medical units for military purposes or consider the improper military use of privileged buildings, such as hospitals, to be a war crime.³⁶⁰ The protection due hospitals ceases, however, only after due warning and a reasonable time limit, and that warning has gone unheeded.³⁶¹ Further investigation is needed before conclusions can be reached with respect to this incident.

While the Israeli operation was underway in Jamaliyeh, nearly 100 residents fled their homes on the main road nearby and gathered at the home of Mukhtar Hussain Jamal al-Din, a staunch supporter of the Lebanese Communist Party. Almost all of those inside the home were women and children, and the men gathered outside under trees to alleviate some of the crowding inside. According to the mukhtar, two of the men outside the home, 18-year-old Maxim Jamal al-Din, the son of the mukhtar, and 58-year-old `Awad Jamal al-Din, were armed with AK-47s.³⁶²

Around 2:00 a.m., Israeli helicopters appear to have spotted the large group of men sheltering under the trees outside the mukhtar’s home, as it fired six Hellfire missiles at them. The missiles killed all three of the Lebanese Communist Party members (Maxim Jamal al-Din, `Awad Jamal al-Din, who were both armed, and Hassan Jamal al-Din, who was unarmed) as well as three unarmed men and a boy: Naji Jamal al-Din, 45, a furniture maker; his son Muhammad Najdi Jamal al-Din, 12; Malik Jamal al-Din, 22, a painter; and Hussain al-Mekdad, 42, a public transport worker.³⁶³ Several others, including a 76-year-old man and the mukhtar’s 19-year-old daughter, were injured in the attack. The three dead members of the Lebanese Communist Party were claimed as “martyrs” by the party.

The mukhtar and other relatives argued to Human Rights Watch that the Israeli helicopters had unlawfully attacked the armed men at the house because the armed men had not engaged the Israeli commandos or fired at the helicopters, and had “merely” been prepared to confront the Israeli soldiers if they entered the neighborhood of the home. However, such an interpretation misunderstands the laws of war: the two armed men were combatants under the laws of war, and the IDF could lawfully fire upon. The two combatants endangered the lives of the civilians by mixing with them, as the combatants could be legitimately attacked by the IDF. The four unarmed bystanders killed in the attack put themselves at risk by mixing with combatants during an Israeli military operation, and must be considered collateral casualties to a legitimate Israeli military strike.

Around 3:30 a.m., Israeli helicopters fired a missile at a Syrian Kurdish farmer’s family that was attempting to flee its tent for the safety of a nearby home owned by a Lebanese man. The farmers had come to Lebanon to work as seasonal agricultural laborers and resided in tents in a field approximately one kilometer away from the Jamal al-Din house. According to the relatives of the family, five families of farmers had been sheltering in fear in their tents since the commando raid began shortly after 9:00 p.m., hearing constant explosions and Israeli aircraft and helicopters in the air. “The children were crying, and everyone was afraid,” Mahmud Sukar, 37, recalled to Human Rights Watch, “at around midnight, Talal’s family came outside. His wife was crying, and the children were afraid. They wanted to leave but didn’t know where to go.”³⁶⁴

At 3:30 a.m., Talal Chibli decided it was unsafe to remain in the tents and ran with his family towards the relative safety of a nearby Lebanese home. Just 30 meters from his home, an Israeli Apache helicopter fired a missile at the family. Six members of the family were killed: Talal Chibli, 40 (who died seven hours later); his wife Maha Sha`ban, 32; and their children Muhannad, 13, Muayyad, 12 (who died at 7:30 a.m. from his wounds), Asma’, age six, and Muhammad, four. Three children survived with grave wounds: Muthana, age nine (who remained hospitalized one month after the attack when Human Rights Watch visited the scene of the incident), Mus`ab, age five, and Batul, eight months.

The Syrian farmworkers had no links to Hezbollah and were not participating in the hostilities. “There was no resistance [Hezbollah] here; no one fired at the Israelis when they landed,” Isma`il al-Hammud, a relative of those killed, recalled. “Our tents were shaking from the explosions. The Israelis would fire at anything that moved. At least three dogs died around here [from the