Israel attacks escalate sharply, LBN
Israel attacked
Hezbollah with ordinary weapons — missiles, and perhaps bombs and shells too. Reportedly
these hit 1300 targets and killed around 500 people. Since 90 of them were women or minors, we can
roughly estimate that counting also the adult men, around 140 to 200 of those killed were civilians.
That sort of outcome is comparable to what happens when Israel attacks in Gaza with the same
weapons: lots of civilian casualties.
The Israeli attacks in Gaza are a series of atrocities, and these attacks in Lebanon were atrocities
too. They were atrocities, and war crimes, because Israel violates the requirement that civilian
casualties be
"proportionate"
— not excessive.
It's clear that Israel does not try very much to avoid excessive
civilian casualties. Indeed, when army snipers shoot protesters and
journalists, who are specially protected civilians, Israel hardly
tries to punish them.
Ironically, one exception which contrasts with that habit of disregarding this principle is the
pager attack of last weekend. Whether or not Israel actively sought on that occasion to follow the
requirement of proportionality, in practice it did so. Some 3000 pagers were in use, and were
likely to explode, and in the process
only two
children were killed.
It is bad when children are killed, or adult civilians are killed. It is bad when anyone is killed,
even enemy soldiers, because nobody ever deserves to be killed. War normally requires trying to
kill some enemy soldiers, but even those don't personally deserve death.
Thus we should try to avoid war, fighting only a last resort. And even when fighting is necessary,
we should strive to keep civilian casualties down to a proportionate level.
This is why, rather than being especially outraged at the pager attack and denouncing it as
egregious, I take the opposite view: the pager attack is the proportionate exception which
highlights Israel's usual disregard for the lives of civilians.
HAMAS and Hezbollah also often disregard proportionality when they
attack, but —another irony— their missile attacks typically do so
little
harm to anyone that the question of proportionality may be merely theoretical.