Hizbullah accused of war crimes

MIDDLE EAST: In a report published yesterday Amnesty International accused Hizbullah of committing "serious violations of international humanitarian law, amounting to war crimes" during the recent conflict in Lebanon.

The report condemned the "deliberate targeting" of Israeli civilians, of whom 43 were killed, including seven children, and the driving of 350,000 to 500,000 people from their homes in northern towns and settlements.

For more than a month at least 100 Hizbullah rockets a day, a total of 3,970, fell on northern Israel, many landing in heavily populated areas.

According to Israeli estimates, 12,000 buildings were damaged, a small percentage seriously from direct hits, the operations of at least four hospitals were disrupted, and 70 per cent of businesses in the area closed, at a cost of $1.4 billion.

Hizbullah spokesmen justified these attacks by saying that the shelling was in reprisal for Israeli attacks on Lebanese civilians and infrastructure and was meant to force Israel to stop such attacks.

Nearly 1,200 Lebanese were killed by Israel. Amnesty quotes successive statements from Hizbullah's Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah in which he admitted launching rockets at Israeli cities and warned Israel that there would be further attacks if it continued striking Lebanese civilians.

Amnesty says that failing to make the distinction between civilian and military targets, deliberately targeting civilians and taking reprisals are all violations of "common Article 3 of the four 1949 Geneva Conventions".

Amnesty's report coincided with an editorial in the Israeli daily Haaretz which says that near the end of the war, when it was clear that Israel could not halt the firing of Hizbullah's rockets, "a decision was made to 'flood' [ Lebanon] with cluster bombs".

Haaretz quoted the head of a rocket unit who revealed that Israel fired 1,800 cluster- bomb shells, which released 1.2 million bomblets over Lebanon.