JURIST Special Guest Columnists Gaby El Hakim and Joe Karam, Lebanese lawyers and board members of the
Beirut Bar Association, say indiscriminate Israeli attacks on Lebanese civilians violate all principles of international humanitarian law and call for an immediate ceasefire and concerted negotiations to end the violence and restore a fully-sovereign Lebanon...
In the past thirteen days, Israeli raids on Lebanon have killed hundreds of innocent women and children and destroyed thousands of houses in Beirut and the Bekaa Valley, burying their residents under rubble and demolishing our country’s infrastructure.
Israel has thus turned Lebanon - a country with a fascinating history and a civilization that is the wellspring of the alphabet - into a war region needing billions of dollars to recover after a senseless conflict. Its criminal and brutal acts have been carried out while the international community has stood by and watched.
Throughout our history, Lebanon has been subject to many wars which started on its soil and beneath its sky, sometimes for a reason and sometimes without a reason. Lebanon has been the victim of conflict, and disorder has only been fed by Middle East policymakers aiming to manipulate small countries for their own benefit. But the Lebanese people with their determination and their willingness to fight to rebuild their nation have always recovered.
Now we have witnessed the evacuation of all foreign nationals from Lebanon, a situation that suggests an imminent war on an even bigger scale, once the evacuation is completed, that will leave Lebanon behind to be unfairly destroyed by Israel.
By killing civilians in Lebanon, Israel is breaching all the treaties and international humanitarian laws that stipulate that it is only legal and ethical to attack valid military targets by distinguishing them and attacking them separately (i.e. dividing a district containing several military objectives into sub-targets and consequently attacking each target separately, rather that attacking the whole area). Israel is using what is often called in the war dictionary “carpet bombing” or “area bombardment”. To quote from an article by international law scholar Horst Fischer in the book
Crimes of War:
An explicit ban on area bombardment was first codified in the 1977 Additional Protocol 1, which applies to bombardments of cities, towns, villages, or other areas containing a concentration of civilians. An attack by bombardments by any methods or means that treats as a single military objective, a number of clearly separated and distinct military objectives is considered to be an indiscriminate attack and is prohibited. Launching such an attack in the knowledge that it will cause excessive loss of life, injury to civilians or damage to civilian objects is considered a grave breach”. [emphasis added]
Israeli forces are committing indiscriminate attacks by attacking civilians, innocent women and children, thus ignoring all the ethics of war specified in the Geneva Convention as well as in other war protocols and violating humanitarian law. The Hezbollah resistance militia has likewise violated the safety of civilians by firing sporadic Katyucha rockets on Israeli towns and villages.
We believe that what is happening today stretches far beyond the issue of the prisoner exchange; Israel is imposing a collective sentence upon innocent Lebanese people for the wrong reasons.
Although Lebanon informed Israel that the Lebanese government and the Lebanese people were not aware of, and did not approve the kidnapping of the two Israeli soldiers by Hezbollah, Israel has not recognized this fact, and is still insisting on holding all the Lebanese people responsible for a politically motivated decision taken by a specific party with regional affiliations.
We believe that the current chaos is the result of an international policy which manages the crisis in Lebanon specifically and in the Middle East in general in favor of some countries, instead of stopping it from spreading and solving the problem at its roots.
The main reason of the crisis and disorder in the Middle East is the adoption of a double standard, so that victims from one side do not have the same value as those on another side! Accountability is not universal in this Middle East, and the rule of law does not always prevail always as a universal principle. Many policymakers brainwash countries and communities and manipulate them, making them believe that they are fighting for their rights and existence while they are in reality serving other peoples' interests.
Despite the fact that leaders from all countries agree that true democracies should prevail in the Middle East and that peace and freedom and the rule of law should arise, we still find them adopting double standards, thus violating the principle of justice known as impartiality, based on the assumption that the same standards should be applied to all people, without regard to subjective based on ethnicity, class, gender or other distinction. In this respect we find some recent political speeches which have appeared to distinguish between the civilians killed in Lebanon and Israel to be outrageous, emphasizing the double standard principle instead of neglecting it.
In line with the above, we would like to remind the international community that the war decision in Lebanon was not taken by the government and therefore it does not involve the country as such, and for that reason more restraints must be considered in this situation.
We as Lebanese lawyers and citizens ask the United Nations to help us reach an immediate ceasefire and to help us impose the Lebanese government's sovereignty on all its territories in order to save the Lebanese people from the violent military campaigns conducted by Israel, as well as to save our country from serving other countries' interests aiming to destroy its industry and devastate the entire population.
A very relevant remark was made on CNN recently by an Israeli whose house in Haifa was hit by a Hezbollah missile. The reporter asked him, “What are your feelings?” He answered: “We have to talk to the enemy. The violence will never end this way. I still believe that negotiation and peace is the only way”. Violence in the Middle East will never end until real negotiation takes place and a truly neutral mediator seeks real understanding of the needs of each party.
Gaby El Hakim is a lawyer in Beirut, Lebanon, and a board member of the Beirut Bar Association Commission on Sport.
Joe E. Karam, also a lawyer from Beirut, is a board member of the Beirut Bar Association's Commission on International Relations, and Editor of the AIJA Law Journal
printed in Brussels. He is currently stranded in Washington, DC, having boarded the last flight out of Beirut's Rafik Hariri International Airport on July 12 before it was attacked by Israeli warplanes.
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