The Winograd Commission’s final report on Israel’s conduct during the Second Lebanon War, published Wednesday, placed blame for the fiasco on the Israeli Army – not for killing over 1,000 innocent civilians and targeting Lebanon’s infrastructure, but for failing to defeat Hezbollah with a clear strategy. Just as dialogue in the United States regarding the Iraq War is confined to military success rather than whether we even have the right to be there, so too does the Israeli report fail to address the illegality of the war itself and how it came to occur. Like us, they are more upset with the death of one of their soldiers than with the death of a thousand civilians as the result of their invasion.

Because of this, Amnesty International called the final Winograd Commission’s report “deeply flawed” for failing to investigate government policies and military strategies that led to Israel committing war crimes. While the Winograd inquiry committee was not vested with the powers of an official state commission of investigation, it did have the power to subpoena witnesses and recommend the prosecution of officials it found to have been responsible for willful or negligent criminal conduct.

“This was yet another missed opportunity to address the policies and decisions behind the grave violations of international humanitarian law , including war crimes, committed by Israeli forces,” said Malcolm Smart, Director of Amnesty International’s Middle East and North Africa Program. “The indiscriminate killings of many Lebanese civilians not involved in the hostilities and the deliberate and wanton destruction of civilian properties and infrastructure on a massive scale were given no more than token consideration by the commission.”

Amnesty International stated that the Lebanese civilian population paid the heaviest price for the war, stating that the majority of the 1,190 people killed “were civilians not involved in the hostilities, among them hundreds of children”. Heavy criticism of Israel targeting Lebanese homes, properties, and infrastructure was also present in the report. The organization called on Israel to provide data on the use of cluster bombs during the war, establish an independent and impartial investigation into evidence that IDF forces violated international human rights and humanitarian law during the conflict, and ensure that those responsible are brought to justice.

According to Amnesty International, the Winograd Commission “essentially brushed aside available evidence of serious violations of international law, claiming that interpretations of international humanitarian law are controversial, that it did not have the capacity to deal with the volume of data, that the alleged violations were already being investigated by other bodies, and that such allegations are used as propaganda against Israel, whereas it did scrutinize military strategies and the conduct of certain operations in detail, including in cases which were already being investigated separately.”

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