SMOKE WAS STILL billowing from the mounds of debris that was all that was left of a multistorey building in Dahiyeh hit at 4am earlier that morning. Beirut’s southern suburbs have been heavily targeted since Israel launched a widespread bombing campaign across Lebanon in September.
A neighbour in one of the residential towers adjacent to the smouldering crater left by the strike said they had heard someone screaming for a few hours beneath the rubble but no longer heard them. “We are witnessing unbelievable levels of violence,” says another resident, Gassan Jouneh, who says: “The missiles that Israel is launching at Lebanon are of the heaviest ever.”
I’m only allowed to be at the site of this strike because Hezbollah has granted permission for the media to tour the area and see the latest damage inflicted by Israeli strikes. Over the course of the afternoon, more than a hundred journalists traverse from rubble-strewn site to rubble-strewn site, in the mostly emptied suburbs of Beirut, along roads full of damaged store fronts, with cars parked in front with shattered windows.
Dahiyeh is a densely populated area with a majority Lebanese Shia population, many of whom moved to Beirut from south Lebanon to escape fighting during the civil war and one of Israel’s repeated invasions of Lebanon. It’s a bustling urban metropolis as well as a stronghold of Hezbollah, the Iran-backed paramilitary group which has been fighting an escalating war with Israeli forces since last October.
In a series of assassinations, Israel dropped US-made bombs estimated to be as large as 900 kg on buildings in Dahiyeh, killing Hezbollah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah, as well as his future successor Hashim Saffiedine, and several senior commanders.
Dozens of Lebanese civilians were killed during the same attacks. The Israeli military says the strikes are aimed at Hezbollah, “but the impact on ordinary people and civilians has been catastrophic,” says Ramzi Kaiss, a researcher for Human Rights Watch.
Dr Heidi Matthews, assistant professor of law at Osgoode Hall Law School in Canada, says that “since the beginning of this century, which coincides with the beginning of the so-called War on Terror, we have seen a consistent willingness to accept a far greater degree of civilian harm in operations against so-called terrorist groups or individuals.”
“In the US military in 2003 at the beginning of the second Iraq War, the civilian casualty limit was actually 30, and that was the cutoff,” she says. “So, even if you were attacking Saddam Hussein, you couldn’t kill more than 30… it would be an illegitimate attack.”
“We’ve seen this gradual shift upwards in terms of an acceptance of civilian harm,” says Matthews, particularly as drone warfare became more common during the fight against ISIS and during the wars in Lebanon in 2006 and Gaza in 2014.
During the six-week war between Israel and Hezbollah in 2006, the Israeli military devised a strategy known as The Dahiyeh Doctrine. During the short war, Israeli forces killed more than a thousand people in Lebanon and displaced 900,000. Airstrikes destroyed or seriously damaged essential civilian infrastructure including more than 30,000 homes, airports, water reserves, sewage treatment plants, schools and hospital
The Israel Defense Forces commander Gadi Eisenkot articulated the approach to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz in 2008: “We will wield disproportionate power against every village from which shots are fired on Israel, and cause immense damage and destruction. From our perspective, these are military bases.”
The doctrine’s purpose is “to inflict large-scale destruction of civilian infrastructure in order to pressure and deter ‘enemy’ governments and hostile armed factions,” says Somdeep Sen, an Associate Professor in International Development Studies at Roskilde University, Denmark. “After 2006, the doctrine has been central to Israeli military onslaughts on Gaza.”
Matthews says that the Dahiyeh Doctrine provides that “the higher the value of the military target, the greater the degree of civilian harm you can cause.” She adds that causing “clearly disproportionate civilian harm using means that are indiscriminate makes the doctrine itself illegal, in the sense that it amounts to a version of collective punishment.”
According to two Israeli military sources who spoke with the outlet 972, the army decided during the first weeks of the war in Gaza that, for every junior Hamas operative that its AI-backed targeting system known as Lavender assessed as a target, it was permissible to kill up to 15-20 civilians.
Previously, the Israeli military did not officially authorise any “collateral damage” during assassinations of low-ranking militants. According to the sources, on several occasions, the Israeli military authorised the killing of more than 100 civilians in the assassination of a single commander.
On the first day of Israel’s major bombing campaign across Lebanon in September, over 500 people were killed. Since 17 September, there have been 23 attacks on healthcare facilities in Lebanon and 72 health workers have been killed, according to the World Health Organization.
Dr Heidi Matthews, assistant professor of law at Osgoode Hall Law School in Canada, says there is a general principle in international law that attacks may only be directed against military objectives — “a military objective, under customary international law, is defined as infrastructure which, by its nature, location or purpose, makes both an effective contribution to military action, and where its destruction or damage to it in the circumstances would offer a definite military advantage.”
Civilian infrastructure including hospitals, schools and media outlets have all been routinely hit and destroyed by the Israeli military during the ongoing war in Gaza. The Israeli military accuses Hamas of embedding itself in civilian infrastructure which it says makes it a legitimate target.
The International Red Cross (IRC) defines dual use targets as those which are ordinarily used by both the military and civilians and from which the military obtains significant military advantage, citing, as examples, “bridges by which both the military and civilians cross rivers, and electricity generating stations producing electrical power for both the military and civilians, including hospitals.”
The IRC says that international law does not recognise any specific class of dual use objects, this means that any strike on, for example, a bridge or a hospital, would have to be specifically justified with evidence that the infrastructure was being used for a military objective — “anything outside that formula is by definition a civilian object and cannot be attacked.”
Earlier in October, seven paramedics and rescue workers from the Hezbollah-affiliated Islamic Health Committee were killed during an Israeli strike in central Beirut. “There’s no credible argument that the medics were also engaging in hostilities at the same time that they’re doing their medical work,” says Matthews. “The general rule is that they’re specially protected and cannot be directly targeted at any time.”
One of the sites we visit on the Hezbollah media tour, is the former office of Al-Sirat TV station, a Lebanese Islamic media outlet which publishes religious content. Hussein Mortada, a political analyst and journalist with the outlet, stood in front of the debris of his former office, which is now adorned with Hezbollah flags and posters of Hassan Nasrallah, the slain leader of the paramilitary group. Mortada says that when the strike he was nearby but not in the building – “if I were present in that building, then I wouldn’t be standing here in front of you.”
Speaking to a group of press on the tour of Dahiyeh, Mortada said: “Our flag will not fall and by that, we mean that the flag of righteousness, the flag of Hezbollah, the resistance and the people will not falter, and we will not be defeated and will never retreat. We will stand resilient in our land, and these are our houses here. I’m from Dahiyeh, and we have lived here, where we know every street and corner, so they will never make us leave. We will stay here, we will die here as martyrs, and we will live here.”
Al-Sira TV is openly and undeniably sympathetic towards Hezbollah — but did that make it a legitimate target for Israel?
Israel has said that Al-Sirat was used for “combat means” while Hezbollah has denied that weapons were stored at the media outlet’s building and no evidence of arms found at the building was provided by Israel.
Matthews says that simply disseminating Hezbollah ideologies, excluding inciting violence, would not be classed as “an effective contribution to a military effort.” The law professor cites a ruling by a criminal tribunal which dealt with NATO’s bombing of a Serbian TV and radio station during the conflict in Yugoslavia. The tribunal ruled that “if media infrastructure was merely disseminating propaganda to generate support for the war effort, it was not a legitimate target.”
A year ago, Palestinian human rights lawyer Raji Sourani, whose home in Gaza City was destroyed by an Israeli airstrike, said that the Palestinian enclave was becoming “the graveyard of international law.”
Twelve months later and only more headstones — perhaps with the terms “civilian harm” “healthcare workers” and “media” etched on them — have been added to that graveyard.
Hannah McCarthy is a journalist based in Beirut, Lebanon.
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