Ramzi Kaiss, the Human Rights Watch researcher who has been documenting the Lebanon casualty record since the war's first month, told Al Jazeera on April 29 that the international system's "silence has only emboldened atrocities." [1] He was referring to the strike that killed three Lebanese Civil Defense rescue workers as they tried to reach the wounded near Tyre — the kind of strike that, in the European chancelleries, used to produce demarches. The chancelleries were quiet. Mr. Kaiss said so in writing. The paper recorded the request yesterday, when Beirut's prime minister used the words "war crimes" without ornament. Today Lebanon asked the international system to put findings on paper.
The escalation in Beirut's posture is procedural and therefore serious. Lebanon's foreign ministry has now formally requested that the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, the United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry, and the special rapporteurs on extrajudicial killings and on adequate housing each render documented findings on incidents from January through April. The submissions name forty-one strikes. They include grid coordinates, casualty counts, and the medical records of survivors who consented to be cited. [2] The legalistic care of the paperwork is itself a frame: Beirut wishes the historical record to be written by people whose job it is to write history, not by the people who keep losing the war.
The Security Council Report's monthly forecast, published Friday by the small but unsentimental Geneva-based outfit that tracks the Council's actual workload, places Lebanon on the May agenda for the first time in four months. [3] The forecast lists no draft resolution and names no penholder, which is, in the language of UN watchers, a polite way of saying that Britain, France and the United States have not agreed on what they want done. The discussion will happen. The discussion will, in all likelihood, conclude without a vote. The discussion will, however, be on the record.
Mr. Kaiss's organization went further on April 23. In a written analysis fronted by senior Israel-Palestine researcher Omar Shakir, Human Rights Watch characterized Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz's public no-return statement — the announcement that residents of certain south-Lebanon villages would not be permitted to return to their homes — as evidence of forced displacement undertaken on the basis of religion, which is a war crime under the Rome Statute and a possible crime against humanity besides. [4] HRW does not throw the phrase "crime against humanity" at episodes lightly. The phrase is in the published text. The text is in the catalogue. The catalogue is the kind of document that international tribunals later cite when they begin to write indictments.
The arms-sales question, which Mr. Kaiss raised explicitly, is the part of the record that connects Beirut's tribunals to Washington's, London's and Berlin's parliaments. American precision-guided munitions transfers to Israel have proceeded under existing authorities since October 2023. The British government's June 2024 partial suspension of arms-export licenses covered thirty items; the remaining licenses are unaffected. The German government's Federal Security Council has not declined a request from Jerusalem in two years. [5] The Lebanese filing is, among other things, an instrument designed to give domestic legislatures in the supplier countries something cited and footnoted to vote on.
Israel's foreign ministry described the Lebanese submissions as "lawfare." The phrase is a term of art. It means an opponent has chosen to fight on a terrain — courts, tribunals, special procedures — that the speaker would prefer not to fight on. The terrain has the advantage that records survive ceasefires. They survive governments. They survive the news cycle that has, today, gone to Hormuz and to Berlin and to Beijing.
Lebanon's request will produce, over the coming months, a stack of paper. The stack will not stop a strike. It will, however, exist. It will be looked up.
-- CHARLES ASHFORD, London