Amnesty International issued a report last week accusing Israel of committing “war crimes” during last summer’s Second Lebanon War and in counter-terror operations since then.
The group’s report, an annual assessment of human rights violations, accused both the IDF and the Hizbullah – to an equal extent – of “serious violations of international humanitarian law, including war crimes.”
The report alleges: “Israeli forces carried out indiscriminate and disproportionate attacks on a large scale. Israeli forces also appear to have carried out direct attacks on civilian infrastructure intended to inflict a form of collective punishment on Lebanon's people, in order to induce them and the Lebanese government to turn against Hizbullah, as well as to cause harm to Hizbullah's military capability.” The report also condemned the IDF's use of cluster bombs, which it says has caused the death of 20 people since the end of the war.
With regard to Hizbullah, the report states: “Hizbullah's rocket attacks on northern Israel amounted to deliberate attacks on civilians and civilian objects, as well as indiscriminate attacks. Its attacks also violated other rules of international humanitarian law, including the prohibition on reprisal attacks on the civilian population"
The Jerusalem-based organization NGO Monitor took issue with Amnesty's claims. "Many of Amnesty's claims regarding the Lebanon War were false or severely lacking in credibility,” an NGO Monitor report found. “Amnesty accuses Israel of targeting residential areas without mentioning Hizbullah's systematic practice of operating from within civilian areas…[Also], no statements or documents of any type were issued condemning Hizbullah for abducting two Israeli soldiers, despite Amnesty's core mission of promoting freedom for political prisoners.
Turning to Judea, Samaria and Gaza, the Amnesty report claimed “650 Palestinians were killed by Israeli soldiers in 2006.” It later qualifies the figure that, saying “half of them [were] unarmed civilians.”
The IDF responded to the report, calling it “inaccurate.” The chief critique is that Amnesty regularly equates "terrorist groups who indiscriminately target civilians to a democratic country acting within the legal framework, fulfilling the right to defend its land, sovereignty, and citizens."
At the same time, the statement said the IDF has "great respect for Amnesty International for its actions in promoting the issue of human rights and does not intend to contest what is written in the report."
NGO Monitor went further than the IDF, pointing out that “the article accuses Israel of engaging in ‘excessive and disproportionate force against the Palestinian population’ without providing a legal analysis for this statement. The article goes on to claim Israel is ‘appropriating large areas of fertile Palestinian land’ without providing any sources for this allegation.”
NGO Monitor's report found that Amnesty International inordinately targeted the Jewish state for criticism. Conducting a quantitative analysis of Amnesty International’s focus and allotment of resources in the Middle East, the report summed up:
“In 2006, Amnesty International continued to promote a biased, anti-Israel political agenda, which exploited the language of human rights,” the NGO-Monitor report found. “Amnesty officials published more documents on Israel than on any other Middle Eastern country (with the partial exception of Iran).”
One of the key disparities, the report found, is that Amnesty has published far less significant documents dealing with Sudan (37), where there is an ongoing genocide of the local population by Muslim militias, then it did for Israel (48).
Click here to view the report
The NGO-Monitor report concludes: "The illustrations above are but a very few examples of the biased perspective that dominated Amnesty International's publications in 2006, leading to the dissemination of unbalanced and, at times, inaccurate information about the situation in the Middle East.”
Amnesty International’s Israel Branch Director Amnon Vidan defended the organization, saying Israel is held to a higher standard due to its status as a democracy.
“I would suggest NGO Monitor address the content of documents, rather than count their words. That way they will be able sympathize with the suffering of non-Jews," Vidan told Yediot Acharonot. He also said that Amnesty International did not condemn the kidnapping of two IDF reservists by Hizbullah since it “did not violate international law…Only the taking of civilians captive is against international law."
