(Beirut) – The 14-month conflict between Israel and Hezbollah had devastating impacts on civilians in Lebanon and included scores of apparent war crimes and laws of war violations, Human Rights Watch said today in its World Report 2025.
Between October 2023 and December 2024, Israeli strikes across Lebanon killed more than 4,000 people, including more than 240 children, 220 health and rescue workers, and 700 women. The government of Lebanon has yet to take steps to ensure international accountability, including through the International Criminal Court (ICC).
For the 546-page world report, in its 35th edition, Human Rights Watch reviewed human rights practices in more than 100 countries. In much of the world, Executive Director Tirana Hassan writes in her introductory essay, governments cracked down and wrongfully arrested and imprisoned political opponents, activists, and journalists. Armed groups and government forces unlawfully killed civilians, drove many from their homes, and blocked access to humanitarian aid. In many of the more than 70 national elections in 2024, authoritarian leaders gained ground with their discriminatory rhetoric and policies.
“With more than 4,000 dead across Lebanon, including hundreds of children and health workers, the international community has yet to ensure that the impunity for violations of the laws of war is broken once and for all,” said Ramzi Kaiss, Lebanon researcher at Human Rights Watch. “Lebanon should play its part by urgently giving the ICC a mandate to investigate so that those responsible for serious crimes can begin to be brought to justice.”
- Human Rights Watch has documented a series of unlawful attacks and apparent war crimes by the Israeli military, including apparently deliberate attacks on journalists, peacekeepers, medics, and civilian objects, in addition to the unlawful use of booby trapped devices and widespread use of white phosphorus, including unlawfully over populated residential areas.
- Hezbollah fired thousands of munitions into northern Israel and the occupied Syrian Golan Heights, killing at least 30 civilians. A July 27 attack on the town of Majdal Shams in the occupied Golan Heights also killed 12 children. While Israel claimed that it was a Hezbollah rocket attack, Hezbollah has denied responsibility.
- More than a thousand Israeli strikes across Lebanon on September 23 killed 558 people, according to Lebanon’s Public Health Ministry. In subsequent weeks, more than one million people were displaced, thousands of buildings and houses were destroyed, and entire border villages were reduced to rubble. Over 330,000 Syrians, many of whom lived in Lebanon for over a decade, fled to Syria.
- Lebanese authorities have arbitrarily detained, tortured, and forcibly returned Syrians to Syria in 2024, including opposition activists and an army defector.
- The investigation into the August 2020 Beirut port explosion remains stalled and the Lebanese authorities have not taken any significant steps to enable the investigation to proceed unimpeded.
The United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany should suspend weapons transfers to Israel because of the Israeli military’s repeated, unlawful attacks on civilians. Lebanon should give the ICC prosecutor a mandate to investigate serious crimes committed on the country’s territory. And Lebanon and other countries should convene a special session of the UN Human Rights Council to establish an international investigation into human rights violations by all parties involved in the conflict in Lebanon.