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air strikes
Fears of 'Serious Escalation' Grow as Israel Bombs Lebanon and Gaza
Lebanon's caretaker prime minister said he "categorically rejects any military escalation" amid concerns that the fresh exchanges of rocket fire and airstrikes could spark an all-out war.
Apr 07, 2023
Fears of a wider conflict in the Middle East mounted Friday after Israel bombed Lebanon and the occupied Gaza Strip in the early hours of the morning, an assault that followed two consecutive nights of violent raids on the Al-Aqsa mosque compound.
The raids spurred global condemnation and retaliatory rocket fire from southern Lebanon and Gaza, prompting Israel's latest barrage of airstrikes.
While Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu responded to the rocket fire with hawkish rhetoric, vowing to "extract a heavy price from our enemies," other Israeli officials and Lebanon's caretaker prime minister Najib Mikati cautioned against further violence.
"Nobody wants an escalation right now," an Israeli army spokesman told reporters. "Quiet will be answered with quiet, at this stage I think, at least in the coming hours."
Najib Mikati, Lebanon's caretaker prime minister, similarly said his government "categorically rejects any military escalation," adding that an investigation into the rocket attacks that originated in southern Lebanon was ongoing.
The Associated Press reported Friday that "no faction in Lebanon claimed responsibility for the salvo of rockets," the largest such attack since the deadly 2006 war between Israeli and Lebanon.
"A Lebanese security official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to media, said the country's security forces believed the rockets were launched by a Lebanon-based Palestinian militant group, not by Hezbollah," the outlet noted.
No injuries or deaths have been reported in the wake of the Israeli airstrikes, which damaged homes, buildings, and other infrastructure in Lebanon and Gaza. One 19-year-old was lightly injured by shrapnel from the rocket fire into Israel, according to Israeli authorities.
\u201cThe Israeli military launched air strikes on the Gaza Strip on Friday, hours after rockets were fired from Lebanon into Israel on Thursday, amid repeated Israeli assaults on worshippers in Jerusalem's Al-Aqsa Mosque this week.\n\nThere were no immediate reports of casualties\u201d— Middle East Eye (@Middle East Eye) 1680825032
The United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) said in a statement Friday that while Israeli and Lebanese officials have "both said they do not want a war," the "actions over the past day are dangerous and risk a serious escalation."
"We urge all parties to cease all actions across the Blue Line now," UNIFIL added.
Israeli forces' raids on the Al-Aqsa mosque compound and attacks on Palestinian worshipers this week have been vocally denounced by governments and human rights organizations. In 2021, Israeli raids of Al-Aqsa and responses from the Gaza Strip led to a devastating 11-day assault on the besieged enclave.
Heba Morayef, Amnesty International's regional director for the Middle East and North Africa, said in a statement Thursday that "these orchestrated attacks demonstrate just how far Israeli authorities will go to maintain their cruel system of apartheid."
"Shocking footage from the past two days shows Israeli security forces beating men, women, and children, and dragging them out of the mosque where they had gathered to spend the night in peaceful prayer and reflection," said Morayef. "Once again, Israeli security forces have shown the world what apartheid looks like."
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Homes, Markets, Mosques, Schools: Civilian Deaths by Explosive Weapons Soar
Civilians made up nearly 80 percent of more than 41,000 reported deaths last year, caused by bombs, missiles, shelling, and other explosive violence
Jun 22, 2015
For the third year in a row, global civilian deaths and injuries caused by explosive weapons has increased--in some areas making up 92 percent of casualties, a new report published Monday by the international advocacy group Action on Armed Violence (AOAV) revealed.
In 2014, a total of 41,847 people around the world were killed or wounded by explosive weapons. Seventy-eight percent (32,662) were civilians, almost three times as high as the previous year, AOAV found in its report, Explosive States: Monitoring Explosive Violence in 2014 (pdf).
The most deadly places to be a civilian last year were Iraq, Syria, Gaza, Nigeria, and Pakistan--but these areas were only a handful of the dangerous zones where civilians endure the majority of explosive weapon harm, AOAV reported.
AOAV, based in London, began tracking the use of explosive weapons in 2011. Since that time, almost 150,000 people have been reported killed or injured by weapons like air bombs, missiles, rockets, landmines, artillery shells, grenades, car bombs, and improvised explosive devices (IEDs), among others, the report found. In the cases of ground-launched weapons like mortars and grad rockets, civilian deaths accounted for 90 percent of casualties. And deaths from IEDs increased in countries such as China, Egypt, and Yemen.
"This is the third consecutive year that we have seen an increase in civilian deaths and injuries from explosive weapons," said Iain Overton, AOAV director of investigations, in a statement on Monday. "With civilians bearing the brunt of explosive weapon harm in Gaza, Ukraine, Nigeria, Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan the question has to be: 'How many more will have to die before states agree to end the use of explosive weapons in populated areas?'" "These explosive weapons are designed for open battlefields, not built-up urban areas [...] This is not about the weapons themselves--it's about where and how they are used."
--Peter Maur, International Committee for the Red Cross
Rounding out the list of the top six state perpetrators of explosive violence was the U.S., which earned its spot through its bombing campaign against Islamic State (ISIS) fighters in Iraq and Syria. "It should be noted that the impacts of the international coalition aerial bombing campaign in Syria and Iraq were very poorly reported in 2014," the report states, adding:
AOAV recorded only 26 casualty-causing air strikes resulting from coalition bombing in 2014. These resulted in 541 casualties, 88% (474) of which were fatalities. Civilians made up 19% of reported casualties from these air strikes (83 deaths and 20 injuries), 87% of which were documented in Syria.
...It is extremely difficult to draw effective assessments of the impacts of the international coalition's use of explosive weapons on civilians in Syria and Iraq in 2014. Security conditions on the ground and a lack of access to areas outside of government control make it challenging for independent agencies to evaluate the impact of airstrikes. Moreover while the number of individual attacks is publicly recorded by the coalition, there is a lack of transparency surrounding the impacts of these strikes in terms of casualty figures.
The most dangerous areas for a civilian include densely populated cities, markets, and bazaars, and, for children, in their own homes. "Civilian casualties...dramatically increased by 43%, from 2,468 deaths and injuries in 2013 to 3,521," the report found.
"State use of heavy explosive weapons shot up last year," wrote AOAV lead researcher Robert Perkins. "More governments are using more bombs, and all too often they are trying to take out targets within populated areas. Our data has shown year after year that this practice kills and injures civilians far too often for it to be chalked up as unavoidable, isolated mistakes."
The Guardianadds:
In Syria, government forces made dramatically increased use of barrel bombs - containers filled with fuel, explosives and chunks of jagged metal typically pushed out of helicopters by hand, killing people and destroying buildings over a wide areas. In 2013, barrel bombs accounted for 20% of aerial attacks. In 2014, that proportion had doubled. The bulk of barrel bomb attacks (85%) were on urban areas.
Israeli air attacks accounted for more than half the civilian casualties in Gaza in 2014. According to UN figures, there were 2,131 deaths from Israel's Operation Protective Edge in July and August, 69% of which were civilian. But Israel also used high explosive ground-launched and naval shells during that campaign against built-up targets. As a result, Israel outdid even Syria as the state responsible for the most civilian casualties from explosive weapons in 2014, according to the AOAV report.
"Ultimately, civilians in Syria, Gaza, Israel, Afghanistan, Libya, eastern Ukraine and other conflict hotspots pay the price when the shells aimed at military targets end up hitting homes, hospitals and schools. This simply has to stop," Peter Maur, president of the International Committee of the Red Cross, said in October 2014 in a quote cited in AOAV's report. "These explosive weapons are designed for open battlefields, not built-up urban areas [...] This is not about the weapons themselves--it's about where and how they are used."
Explosive violence can be reduced through concrete measures, the report concluded. Those measures include, among others:
- Acknowledge that use of explosive weapons in populated areas tends to cause severe harm to individuals and communities and furthers suffering by damaging vital infrastructure;
- Strive to avoid such harm and suffering in any situation, review and strengthen national policies and practices on use of explosive weapons and gather and make available relevant data;
- Work for full realization of rights of victims survivors;
- Develop stronger international standards, including certain prohibitions and restrictions on the use of explosive weapons in populated areas.
"[B]ombing and shelling is not just a problem of the battlefields of Iraq or Afghanistan. It's one that hits us in our homes, our markets, our mosques and our schools," said Steven Smith, CEO of AOAV. "The use of heavy explosive weapons in populated areas is unacceptable, but all too predictable."
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