Report Accuses Israel of Expulsions

The largest U.S.-based human rights group on Wednesday accused Israel of committing “war crimes” by forcibly expelling civilians from a zone in southern Lebanon where Israel is battling Islamic guerrillas.

In a 56-page report, Human Rights Watch said entire families have been expelled “summarily and in an often cruel manner” from Israeli-controlled southern Lebanon for more than a decade and as recently as last week.

The victims are relatives of men considered a security threat to Israel, who were implicated in terrorist attacks or who have deserted from Israel’s proxy in the region, the South Lebanon Army, Human Rights Watch said. Many of those expelled were elderly or children.

Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, who was in Jerusalem to release the report, called on the new government of Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak to halt the practice immediately as a confidence-building gesture toward making peace with Israel’s Arab neighbors.

Government officials declined comment on the allegations.

Barak, who took office earlier this month, has vowed to end Israel’s 20-year occupation of southern Lebanon within a year and hopes to strike a peace deal with Syria, Lebanon’s patron, to accomplish the goal and also guarantee protection of Israel’s harassed northern border. Scores of Israeli soldiers have died in a war of attrition against Hezbollah guerrillas.

Hundreds of Lebanese civilians have been expelled since 1985, Roth said. The exact number is not known, he said, because no one has kept track. An estimated 100,000 civilians live in the 9-mile-deep buffer zone, which is patrolled by the 2,500-man South Lebanon Army, or SLA, and about 1,000 Israeli troops.

Human rights investigators said the pattern of expulsions involved Israeli intelligence agents first questioning or arresting a male suspect. Shortly after that, SLA officers would round up the suspect’s family members, usually in the middle of the night, and bundle them off to the nearest crossing point out of the occupied zone and into a no man’s land. There they would wander until being picked up by the Lebanese army. They are not allowed to retrieve possessions and end up destitute and homeless.

Human Rights Watch holds Israeli authorities responsible for the policy.

The expulsions increased dramatically in 1998 and 1999, Roth said, possibly because the SLA has deteriorated as a fighting force, more of its men have deserted and Hezbollah has had more success in infiltrating Israeli and SLA operations.

He said the International Committee of the Red Cross listed 46 civilians expelled last year, whereas the U.S. State Department, which he said tended to “gloss over” human rights violations by its ally Israel, listed 12 cases.

On Jan. 7 this year, Human Rights Watch reported, 25 members of the families of five Nabai brothers were expelled from the southern Lebanon town of Sheba. Two of the brothers had been imprisoned 10 days earlier in the wake of the assassination of the town’s SLA security chief. Among those expelled were the Nabais’ 60-year-old mother and 16 children between the ages of 9 months and 13 years.

Forced transfers of civilians are a form of “collective punishment” that constitutes a violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention and a “grave breach” of the laws and customs of war, Roth said.

“It is a war crime to expel civilians from occupied territory,” he said.

Roth said every Israeli government official that his organization contacted declined to meet with him to discuss the report. Contacted by The Times, the Israeli army declined comment, as did the Justice Ministry and the office of Uri Lubroni, the government’s liaison to southern Lebanon.

“There appears to be no greater openness to discussing troublesome aspects of the policy than there was with the previous government,” Roth said. “I hope there is a greater willingness to change it.”