It’s 2 a.m. and it’s pitch black. You are awakened by a phone call. A stranger on the phone tells you that you and your family must leave immediately because the area is about to be bombed.

Are you leaving everything behind: your house, your family heirlooms, your pets? Can you just leave 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, says Aya Majzoub, deputy regional director for the Middle East and North Africa at Amnesty International.

According to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rightsabout a quarter of Lebanese territory “is now under Israeli military movement order.” In other words, while fighting the Hezbollah group, the Israeli army asked residents to leave the area because they would be in danger if they did not.

“And most people don’t even receive phone calls,” Majzoub told DW. “Often, the Arabic-language spokesperson for the Israeli army simply announces warnings on social networks,” she explains.

A few days ago this happened in the middle of the night. “Evacuation alerts were posted on Twitter (now calledMost people would have missed them completely if not for the young men from the neighborhoods who ran into the street and started shooting into the air to wake people up. »

This is just one of the incidents that has led groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch to criticize the way Israel gives evacuation warnings to Lebanon. Their concerns also include inaccurate or misleading maps, warnings just minutes before an attack, and overly general warnings.

Most recently, Israel issued its first city-wide warning during the conflict in Lebanon. On the morning of October 30, an Israeli military spokesperson wrote on and your villages.

The town of Baalbek usually has between 80,000 and 100,000 inhabitants and residents were quick to leave. Israeli airstrikes began four hours later. Once again, evacuation warnings were criticized because four hours is not enough time to evacuate an entire city. This week, THE Washington Post published a reportshowing that most of the strikes that day took place outside the mapped evacuation zone anyway.

Days earlier, the Hezbollah group also issued a series of evacuation warnings in a video posted on a messaging service. In it, Hezbollah asked residents of more than 20 towns in northern Israel to evacuate because they were targets, thanks to the presence of Israeli troops. Although Hezbollah has rockets, unlike Israel it does not have an air force, which is why many observers have described the warnings as essentially “psychological warfare.”

Nonetheless, Amnesty International has the same concerns about Hezbollah’s evacuation warnings as Israel’s. “When these warnings concern entire towns and villages and do not specify particular military targets, they are also too general,” notes Majzoub.

What is the legal situation?

The requirement for the military to warn civilians before an attack dates back to 1863 and the American Civil War, when “Liberty Instructions” were written. It was the first attempt to define rules of conduct on the battlefield and many of the principles contained therein would eventually form the basis of what is known today as “international humanitarian law”.

More recently, we have seen the “duty to warn” as “customary law” — that is to say, it is generally accepted by most armies. The International Committee of the Red Cross, or ICRC, notes that many modern military codes of conduct, including that of Israelcontain this obligation.

But deciding whether to warn civilians depends on the situation and whether it is “feasible.” For example, a warning could remove the element of surprise. Decisions regarding feasibility are made by the attacker and in its calculations the law states that they must also include factors such as proportionality, that is, the number of civilians who could be killed or injured for achieve a goal.

“For an attacker, the warnings make sense from a legal perspective,” wrote Michael Schmitt, professor of public international law at the University of Reading in the United Kingdom. a text for the American military academy at West Point last October. “After all, the fewer civilians there are in the target area, the less likely the rule of proportionality is to prohibit the attack.”

Feasible and effective

If a military decides that a warning is “achievable”, then the rules state that 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 fellow at the Oxford Institute for Ethics, Law and Health, told DW. armed conflicts. It is important to differentiate between the two, “because we are not in a situation of occupation (in Lebanon), the parties are not able to give orders”, she underlines. “So the question is: Are (the warnings) effective in the circumstances? Do they allow civilians to move away from danger?”

But what an “effective” warning actually is can depend on the context and who is issuing it. For example, the U.S. military says warnings don’t need to be specific if they could harm a mission.

“It’s obviously subjective,” concedes Amnesty International’s Majzoub. “But I think we can all agree that giving people a warning on social media in the middle of the night is not effective,” she argued, referring to the recent incident in Beirut.

Civilians protected, even if they remain

Following an evacuation warning, other rules continue to apply, Gillard said. For example, if civilians remain in the area for which the warning was issued, they cannot automatically be considered combatants. The military concerned must also take proportionality into account.

Once civilians have moved away from danger, they must also be allowed to return once the scene is safe. If they are not authorized, this can be considered forced displacement, considered a war crime.

“I am very uncomfortable with people saying that you are warning that you are going to carry out an operation in a particular area, which encouraging civilians to leave is tantamount to forcibly displacing them,” Gillard stressed. “This argument doesn’t really hold water. A warning is a protective measure. »

Evacuation warnings could potentially lead to forced displacement if they are given with the intention of preventing people from returning, Majzoub says. As for what is currently happening in Lebanon, it is difficult to say because the conflict is only just beginning, she explains.

“But we see that every few days more and more cities and towns are added to this list (of evacuation warnings),” she said. “This then begs the question: Are they (the Israeli military) really issuing these warnings to protect people or to trigger mass displacement and relocation?”

Edited by: Andreas Illmer

How the war in Lebanon is endangering pregnant women and babies

To view this video, please enable JavaScript and consider switching to a web browser that supports HTML5 video