Israel’s forced displacement orders in Lebanon may constitute grave breaches of International Humanitarian Law, say aid agencies
Oxfam Australia Media Release
The 136 forced displacement orders Israel imposed on 25 per cent of Lebanon during its 62-day war were woefully inadequate, unnecessarily dangerous and likely illegal, aid agencies said today.
These orders, which Israel called evacuations, either targeted defined locations, were mass orders that encompassed entire villages, neighbourhoods and towns, or vague directives on nonspecific areas that collectively forced 1.4 million people to flee their homes to overcrowded shelters, and some onto the streets, as nearly every governate in Lebanon came under attack.
In a joint report released today, Forced Displacement Orders: Debunking the Myth of Humane Attacks, ActionAid and Oxfam reveal that so-called evacuation orders between September 23rd and October 31s may amount to a campaign of forcible transfer – a grave breach of International Humanitarian Law (IHL). The report highlights how these displacements were neither legitimate nor safe, leaving families without shelter or protection and raising serious concerns about potential war crimes.
The report found the orders were impossible to comply with and triggered waves of mass displacement that failed to meet all standards of IHL which demands effective advance warnings that are clear, targeted, and give sufficient time to allow people to leave safely, as well as a timeline for them to return home.
Out of the 3334 air strikes Israel conducted from Sept 23 to Oct 31st, only 117 (3.5 per cent) area specific forced displacements orders were issued. On average, the orders were sent with only 15-45 minutes warning before a strike, with the majority issued in the middle of the night between 10pm and 4am.
“The chaos, destruction, and disruption caused by these displacements will continue to affect the most vulnerable communities long after the ceasefire,” said Oxfam Lebanon Country Director Bachir Ayoub.
“Entire communities – many already among the most vulnerable, including Syrian and Palestinian refugees and migrant workers – were uprooted from their homes and thrust into life-threatening conditions. Thousands, already struggling, saw their vulnerabilities deepen, pushing them to the brink. Many were forced to seek refuge into places where privacy, sanitation, and safety were severely inadequate, putting women and girls at heightened risk of gender-based violence. Essential services like clean water and healthcare have been damaged, while the disruption of schooling has deprived tens of thousands of children of their basic right to education.”
Sudipta Kumar, ActionAid’s Regional Director for the Arab Region, said: “The impact of these attacks by Israeli forces will be felt for many years to come. After the ceasefire, thousands of families returned to their towns and villages to find their homes reduced to wreckage. Many have been left with nothing and cannot afford to rebuild.
“The only way to protect people in Lebanon from further upheaval is to agree an immediate and permanent ceasefire in Lebanon and in Gaza. Until then, families in Lebanon will continue to live in fear that bombs could start dropping on their homes again at any moment.”
Forced displacement is prohibited under IHL, and evacuation is only lawful when civilian safety and well-being are guaranteed, including access to shelter, hygiene, health services, food, and family unity. The agencies found that Israel’s displacement orders in Lebanon failed to meet these conditions, offering no adequate provisions for civilian welfare. As a result, these actions constitute a grave breach of IHL and show blatant disregard for civilian safety.
To ensure that the tens of thousands of civilians still unable to return home can rebuild their lives – and to preserve Lebanon’s fragile peace – the agencies call for all efforts to ensure the current ceasefire agreement in Lebanon holds, an immediate and permanent ceasefire in Gaza is reached with all violations condemned and urgently addressed. As well the as immediate and safe return of displaced people in South Lebanon.
The international community must halt the transfer of weapons and military equipment where there is a risk they will be used to commit further IHL violations and hold all parties accountable for any IHL violations to ensure civilians, regardless of their location or circumstances, are protected.
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Bert Hetebry
Return to home pagePutting any untenable superstition above law is disgraceful, and must be denounced as illegal. As there is no god and no god has ever been seen, no proof exists of any right to imagine a preferred group, a chosen thus special people, a promised thus exclusive land. Despite the old cherished fiction, tales, myths, we accept the rights of all people to some equality of opportunity and existence. It is horribly criminal to claim defence when one attacks, inflicts death and agony and neverending destruction. Law is a human, cultural, intellectual, philosophical construction and must be defined and enforced by and for all, regardless of ancient unsupportable superstitions.Who wants to be eliminated by peoples believing in, say, elephantheaded imaginationspouted images, of crocodile or ox bodied horror figures. So evil. So primitive.
Israel IS a grave breach of International Humanitarian Law. Everything it has done since day one 1948 has been a grave breach of International Humanitarian Law but since the Septic Tanks have backed them to the hilt the world has stood by watching them do anything they please, steal from other nations, slaughter and kill innocents including thousand of children and just behave like complete sub-human arseholes. If there were such a thing as a mythical being’s ‘chosen people’ they wouldn’t be these scumbags. The only place they belong is in that other mythical place with Hades, the Underworld!
The cost of Israel’s wars from 2023 onwards are estimated to be around $50+ billion to date, and perhaps upwards of $400 billion over the next decade. It’s likely that the current (Al Jazeera, 19/12/24) figure of ~45,129 dead Palestinians and 107,338 wounded, along with the Lebanese, Syrian, Yemeni & Iranian casualties will never see justice brought in the sense of Israeli operatives facing court; perhaps Netanyahu and Benny Gantz will eventually face an ICC tribunal charged with genocidal crimes, but unlikely if they stay within Israel.
Crimes and deaths of these magnitudes are hard to comprehend, to digest, to wrap one’s mind around.
Locally, a grubby senior, once an influential ego-inflated radio hack who got his jollies by grabbing scrota and penises and forcing his malicious tongue into unwelcoming mouths is facing court and may well end up behind bars, and deservedly so. Others, less notorious, also face years of confinement for sexual crimes and acts of violence and murder. The law operates well at individual levels, but is seemingly impotent in the face of monstrous eruptions on a volcanic scale, such as is currently being played in the eastern Mediterranean.
The curse of holding great power is threaded throughout history; earlier, Atilla, Genghis Khan, more latterly, Hitler, Putin, Netanyahu, all seemingly above the law, all responsible for incomprehensible amounts of bloodshed, mayhem & destruction.
Israel message to the world: ‘DO NOT DISTURB, GENOCIDE IN PROGRESS’
Western ‘leaders’: OK
MSM: YEP
Well worth it, if it keeps Bibi the Butcher out of gaol.No price too high for our Benny.
I heard Simon Birmingham, the coalition spokesperson, this morning once again trotting out the LNP line that Israel is entitled to its right to self defence ; give me a break, when will these people recognise that what is going on in Gaza is genocidal ethnic cleansing at its worst.
Why Slimeon Birmingham was ever considered a ‘moderate’ is a mystery,but there’s nothing moderate about his weasel mouthings.Perhaps he has Zionist inlaws.
What’s going on with the AIMN website? I see “An error occured during creating the thumbnail” all over it.
Max, the theme (template) we use for the site – and have for ten years – is being phased out by the creator and is no longer being supported, otherwise we’ll get that fixed. We’ve paid a developer to look at it, but the message came back that it’s irreparable.
Over the next week we’ll be experimenting with other themes until we get one that suits. So we’ll be undergoing a few facelifts. We’ll put up a post letting people know what’s going on.
How has it come to this that antisemitism is now a far more heinously egregious affront to common human decency than the blatantly obvious orchestrated and systemic genocidal apartheid of a disimpowered nation and
the mass slaughter of that nations most innocent, the children. Equating anti-Zionism with antisemitism and Judaism with Zionism are a ruse and two dangerous misconceptions that are blatant distractions ment to play into the hands of those who are justifying racial and religious apartheid while Zionist Israel conducts its rapacious genocidal war in Gaza, unabated. Their intent is to deceive and inhibit us from using our critical thinking abilities so as to apply our findings with consistent clarity and objective forthrightness.
Shamefully and without any regard for principles, values or morality, spineless Western politicians grotesque submissiveness to US hegemony and pro Western sanctimonious scum media propagandists have legitimised Zionist Israel’s barbaric and evil trashing of international laws, Christian values and foundational principles that will culminate in the capitulation of civilised society as decent human beings know it to be.
The West will never be forgiven nor will it be forgotten that the West unleashed a vile and sadistic monster in the form of Zionist Israel upon an unsuspecting world. The West’s monster is an uncontrollable nuclear armed rogue pariah state, a UN saboteur, while completely trashing international law and rules based order. Zionist Israel is an existential threat to peace and prosperity for the people of the world. Not only does the Machiavellian cancer of Zionist Israel infect and impact the Palestinian people, but its insidious and treacherous behaviour has and is effecting many parts of the world. Antisemitism is the Zionist weapon of choice to silence and demonise critics.
But they are god’s people, just ask them. How dare anyone speak out against god’s people…. say that over and over and over again and it still makes me feel ill, no ill doesn’t cover it, it is truly sickening.
Zionism, named after the spiritual heart of Israel, the place where Yahweh dwells.
To protest against Zion, to protest against Israel and its ‘defence’ of the land god gave them can be seen, if one so chooses, as a protest against Yahweh, or in Christian terms, God or Emmanuel.
It is all but impossible to argue against such illogic. I recall trying to ask God about something or other that concerned me some time ago and silence was deafening. That sort of confirmed to me that even though all my life until that time I had been assured that I was ‘elected’ by God to use the Calvinist term, chosen as one of his people, special. If I was so f’n special why could he not answer me? Was I not especially marked by him as one of his? That’s what the washing of a drop of water as a week old infant signified.
So he should answer, surely! Or am I being a bit illogical in arriving at that conclusion?
Maybe, just maybe, I was sold a pup, maybe, just maybe my indoctrination was all just mythology, something surreal to hang on to, a promise of eternal bliss, the New Jerusalem with its streets paved in gold, by the sea of crystal with all the other ‘saints, when I die, but that no one has come back from beyond to verify that it is more than mythology.
The same illogic follows here. Let us all get down on bended knee and ask the almighty, Yahweh, God, Immanuel, or what ever other name can be used and see if we can get his rationalisation that it is OK for Israel to murder not just Palestinians living in the open prison camp called the Gaza Strip but also the Bedouin who have occupied the West Bank from time immemorial, or the Lebanese who have taken in refugees from the Nakba of 1948, or the Syrians who at a moment of political upheaval are vulnerable, but being less than human Arabs can be bombed to smithereens.
If we all do this together he m i g h t h e a r us……. Or maybe not.
I tried just now to bend the knee and ask the question, but again, got no answer.
Could it be that he is in fact embarrassed by the cruelty, the self righteousness, the callousness of his people that he cannot find the words to support them?
Or just maybe, that just like every other gentile, non Jew, I am really not special enough to question the almighty on the right to not only protect their land as given to them by the British in 1948, apparently just making sure the promise made to Abraham 2500 years ago, given to be co-inhabited with the existing Palestinian people living their although they were never asked how they felt about that, they were after all just arabs. And turning a blind eye to the ethnic cleansing occurring as the British left the festering sore of neo-colonialism, the land grab by the incoming new settlers.
To protest on behalf of the inhumanity, the genocide being played out by the IDF should be an absolute right, to show our disgust at the cruelty, the destruction of Palestinians and the death being rained on Lebanon and now Syria is a right we have to stand up for the human rights of all, including after 7 October last year, Israelis.