It’s 2 a.m. and pitch black. You are woken up by a phone call. A stranger on the phone says that you and your family must leave immediately because the area is about to be bombed.
Will you leave everything behind: your house, your heirlooms, your pets? Can you just drive off in your pajamas, not knowing if you’ll ever come back?
These are the kinds of questions that thousands of people in Lebanon have been facing recently, said Aya Majzoub, deputy regional director for the Middle East and North Africa at Amnesty International.
According to the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human RightsAbout a quarter of Lebanese territory “is now under Israeli military movement orders.” That is, during the fight against the Hezbollah group, the Israeli army ordered the local population to leave the area because they would be in danger if they did not.
About 67,500 people have been evacuated from Israeli communities near the Lebanese border; about 11,000 chose to stayImage: Alberto Pizzoli/AFP/Getty Images
“And most people don’t even get phone calls,” Majzoub told DW. “Often the Arabic-speaking spokesperson for the Israeli army will only issue warnings on social media,” she explains.
A few days ago that happened in the middle of the night. “Evacuation warnings were posted on Twitter (now called X) between 1 a.m. and 4 a.m.,” says Majzoub. These affected parts of Dahieh in Beirut.”Most people would have missed them completely if it weren’t for young men from the neighborhood running into the street and starting shooting in the air to wake people up.”
This is just one of the incidents that has sparked groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch to criticize the way Israel issues evacuation warnings in Lebanon. Their concerns also include inaccurate or misleading maps, warnings only minutes before an attack, as well as warnings that are too broad.
More recently, Israel issued its first citywide warning during the conflict in Lebanon. On the morning of October 30, an Israeli military spokesman wrote on
The city of Baalbek typically has between 80,000 and 100,000 residents and locals rushed to leave. The Israeli airstrikes began just four hours later. Once again the evacuation warnings were criticized as four hours is not enough to evacuate an entire city. This week, the Washingtonpost published a reportwhich shows that most strikes that day took place outside the mapped evacuation zone anyway.
A few days earlier, the Hezbollah group also issued a series of evacuation warnings in a video on a messaging service. In it, Hezbollah told locals in more than twenty towns in northern Israel to evacuate because they were being targeted, thanks to the presence of Israeli forces. Although Hezbollah has missiles, unlike Israel, it does not have an air force, and many observers describe these warnings mainly as “psychological warfare.”
Yet Amnesty International has the same concerns about Hezbollah’s evacuation warnings as it does about Israel’s. “If these warnings cover entire towns and villages and do not specify specific military targets, they are also too broad,” Majzoub noted.
According to the UN, Baalbek also sheltered another 44,000 people displaced from other parts of Lebanon.Image: Nidal Solh/AFP/Getty Images
What is the legal situation?
The obligation for a military to warn civilians before an attack dates back to 1863 and the American Civil War, when the “Lieber Instructions” were written. This was the first attempt to define rules for conduct on the battlefield and many of its principles would eventually form the basis of what is today known as ‘international humanitarian law’.
More recently the “duty to warn” has been seen as “customary law” – that is, it is generally accepted by most militaries. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) notes that many modern military codes of conduct including that of Israelcontain this obligation.
But the decision whether to warn citizens depends on the situation and whether it is ‘feasible’. For example, a warning can remove the element of surprise. Decisions about feasibility are made by the attacker, and in their calculations the law says they must also consider factors such as proportionality – that is, how many civilians could be killed or injured in achieving an objective.
The ‘Lieber Instructions’ were written by Francis Lieber, a German-born legal expert who lived in New York at the timeImage: Heritage Art/IMAGO
“For an attacker, warnings make sense from a legal perspective,” wrote Michael Schmitt, a professor of public international law at the University of Reading in Britain. a text for the American Military Academy West Point last October. “The fewer civilians there are in the target area, the less likely the proportionality rule will prohibit attacks.”
Feasible and effective
If a military decides that a warning is “feasible,” then the rules say it must also be “effective.”
“In Lebanon we’re not really talking about evacuation orders, we’re talking about warnings,” Emanuela-Chiara Gillard, a senior research fellow at the Oxford Institute for Ethics, Law and Armed Conflict, told DW. It is important to distinguish between the two, “because we are not in an occupation situation (in Lebanon), the parties are not in a position to give orders,” she emphasizes. “So the question then is: are (the warnings) effective in the circumstances? Do they allow citizens to escape danger?”
But what constitutes an ‘effective’ warning may depend on the context and who is issuing the warning. The U.S. military, for example, says warnings don’t have to be specific if they would harm a mission.
“It is clearly subjective,” admits Amnesty International’s Majzoub. “But I think we can all agree that warning people on social media in the middle of the night is not effective,” she argued, referring to the recent incident in Beirut.
Citizens protected – even if they stay
After an evacuation warning, other rules continue to apply, Gillard said. For example, if civilians reside in the area for which the warning has been issued, they cannot automatically be considered combatants. The military involved must also take proportionality into account.
The ICRC says threatening civilians left behind after an evacuation order, or treating them as combatants, is condemned by most militaries.Image: Ibrahim Chalhoub/AFP/Getty Images
Once citizens have escaped danger, they should be able to return as soon as it is safe. If this is not allowed, it could be seen as forced displacement, a war crime.
“I feel very comfortable with people saying you give a warning that you are going to perform surgery in a certain area. encouraging citizens to leave is tantamount to forcibly evicting them,” Gillard noted. ‘That argument doesn’t really hold water. A warning is a protective measure.”
Evacuation warnings could potentially lead to forced displacement if they are issued with the intention of preventing people from returning, Majzoub argues. As for what is currently happening in Lebanon, it is difficult to say because the conflict is still in its early stages, she explains.
“But we are seeing more and more cities and towns being added to this list (of evacuation warnings) every few days,” she noted. “That then begs the question: are they (the Israeli military) actually issuing these warnings to protect people or to cause mass displacement and displacement?”
Edited by: Andreas Illmer
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