It’s 2am and pitch black. The phone wakes me up. A stranger calls and says that the area is about to be bombed and that you and your family should leave immediately.
Would you leave everything behind, your house, your heirlooms, your pets? Would you be able to drive away in your pajamas without knowing if you would come back?
Aya Majzoub, Amnesty International’s deputy director for the Middle East and North Africa, says thousands of people in Lebanon are facing questions like these these days.
According to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, about a quarter of Lebanese territory is “currently under forced evacuation orders by the Israeli military.” In other words, during the battle with the Hezbollah group, the Israeli military told local residents to leave the area because they would otherwise be at risk.
“And most people can’t even receive a phone call,” Majzoub told DW. “In many cases, the Israeli military’s Arabic-language spokesperson simply issues a warning on social media,” she explains.
A few days ago it happened in the middle of the night. ”“An evacuation warning was posted on Twitter (now called X) between 1 a.m. and 4 a.m.,” Majzoub said. These referred to parts of the dahieh of Beirut.Most people would have missed it completely if the young people in the neighborhood hadn’t run out onto the street and started shooting guns into the air to wake people up. ”
This is just one incident that has led groups such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch to criticize Israel’s approach to issuing evacuation orders in Lebanon. Their concerns also include inaccurate or misleading maps, warnings only minutes before an attack, and warnings that are too broad.
Most recently, Israel issued its first city-wide alert during the Lebanon conflict. On the morning of October 30, an Israeli military spokesperson wrote to local residents in the eastern city of Baalbek, writing to X that Israel intended to “act strongly against Hezbollah’s interests in your cities and villages.”
The city of Baalbek, which normally has 80,000 to 100,000 people, was evacuated in a panic. Israeli airstrikes began just four hours later. The evacuation advisory was again criticized because four hours was insufficient to evacuate the entire city. This week, the Washington Post published a report showing that most of the strikes that day were outside the mapped evacuation zones anyway.
In recent days, the Hezbollah group issued a series of evacuation warnings via video messaging service. In the statement, Hezbollah called on local residents to evacuate as more than 20 towns in northern Israel were targeted by the Israeli military presence. Many observers said these warnings were primarily “psychological warfare” since Hezbollah, unlike Israel, has rockets but no air force.
Still, Amnesty International has the same concerns about Hezbollah’s evacuation warning as it does about Israel’s. “If these warnings cover entire towns and villages and do not specify specific military targets, then they are too broad,” Majzoub said.
What is the legal situation?
The military’s obligation to warn civilians before an attack dates back to 1863, when the Lieber Directive was written, and the American Civil War. These were the first attempts to define rules for conduct on the battlefield, and many of the principles they contained would eventually form the basis of what is known today as “international humanitarian law.”
These days, the “duty to warn” is considered “common law.” That is, it is generally accepted in most militaries. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) notes that many modern military codes of conduct, including Israeli ones, include this obligation.
However, the decision to warn civilians depends on the situation and whether it is “feasible.” For example, warnings can remove the element of surprise. The law states that decisions about feasibility are made by the attacker, and that calculations should also include factors such as proportionality, that is, how many civilians could be killed or injured to achieve the objective. There is.
“For an attacker, a warning makes sense from a legal perspective,” Michael Schmidt, a professor of public international law at Britain’s University of Reading, wrote in a letter to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point last October. Ta. “After all, the fewer civilians there are in the target area, the less likely proportionality rules will prohibit an attack.”
Feasible and effective
If the military determines that a warning is “feasible,” the rules say the warning must also be “effective.”
“In Lebanon we are not really talking about an evacuation order, we are talking about a warning,” Emanuela Chiara Gillard, a senior fellow at the Oxford Institute for Ethics, Law and Armed Conflict, told DW. It is important to distinguish between the two, she points out: “There is no occupation situation[in Lebanon]so the parties are not in a position to give orders.” “So the question is: Will (the warnings) be effective under the circumstances? Will they allow civilians to flee the danger?”
However, what actually constitutes an “effective” warning varies by situation and issuer. For example, the U.S. military says warnings don’t need to be specific if they harm the mission.
“It’s obviously subjective,” admits Amnesty International’s Majzoub. “But I think we can all agree that issuing warnings to people on social media in the middle of the night is not effective,” she argued, referring to recent incidents in Beirut.
Civilians are protected even if they remain
Gillard said other rules still apply after an evacuation order is issued. For example, if a civilian is in an area where a warning has been issued, they are not automatically considered combatants. The forces involved must also consider proportionality.
Once civilians are out of danger, they must also be allowed to return when it is safe. If it is not allowed, this is considered forced removal and may be considered a war crime.
“I find it very distasteful that people issue warnings about operations in certain areas. “Encouraging civilians to leave is the same as forcibly evicting civilians,” Gillard said, adding: “That argument is completely baseless. A warning is a safeguard.”
If evacuation orders are issued with the intention of not allowing people to return, Majzoub argues that this could lead to forced evacuations. As for what is currently happening in Lebanon, she explains that it is difficult to say because the conflict is still in its early stages.
“But every few days we see more and more towns and villages being added to this (evacuation advisory) list,” she pointed out. “The question then becomes whether they (the Israeli military) are actually issuing these warnings to protect the population or to cause mass displacement and migration.”
Editor: Andreas Illmer
