Amnesty report accuses Israel of breaching international law

Amnesty International has concluded that Israel violated international humanitarian law and committed war crimes during the four-week war against Hizbullah. It has called for an independent inquiry into the actions of both parties to the conflict.

In a report, Israel/Lebanon: Deliberate destruction or 'collateral damage'? Israeli attacks on civilian infrastructure, issued yesterday, Amnesty surveys the impact of Israeli bombardments on Lebanon between July 12th and August 14th.

"Lebanon's infrastructure suffered destruction on a catastrophic scale. Israeli forces pounded buildings into the ground, reducing entire neighbourhoods to rubble and turning villages and towns into ghost towns . . . families were killed in air strikes on their homes or in their vehicles while fleeing aerial assaults on their villages."

The Israeli air force launched more than 7,000 strikes while the navy carried out 2,500 bombardments, killing 1,183 people, a third of them children, injuring 4,054 and displacing 970,000.

Amnesty delegates visiting target areas reported that water- storage facilities and pumping stations, electrical installations, fuel depots and petrol stations, roads and bridges, airports, radio and television stations and privately owned factories and businesses were attacked by Israel.

Israel imposed an air, naval and land blockade, preventing the delivery of fuel for power plants, hospital and vehicles.

Amnesty also visited the southern suburbs of Beirut to assess damage to areas carpet-bombed by Israel. Satellite photos showing the devastation are included in the report.

Amnesty insists that "in an armed conflict, military forces must distinguish between civilian objects, which may not be attacked, and military objectives, which subject to certain conditions, may be . . . distinction is a cornerstone of the laws of war".

The group contends that Israel launched "direct attacks against civilian objects", "indiscriminate attacks" on broad areas and "disproportionate attacks" in which "collateral damage" to civilian objects near legitimate military targets was "excessive".

Israel, it alleges, also sought to weaken Hizbullah by "harming the economy" of Lebanon and "demoralising the civilian population". It says: "Many of the violations examined in this report are war crimes that give rise to individual criminal responsibility."

Amnesty has asked the UN Security Council and the UN Human Rights Council to request the secretary general to establish a panel of independent experts to conduct an inquiry into the actions of both Israel and Hizbullah.