Human Rights Watch ignores international law in condemning Israeli attack on Houthi installations ~ Elder Of Ziyon

Friday, January 17, 2025

Human Rights Watch ignores international law in condemning Israeli attack on Houthi installations

Human Rights Watch issued a press release condemning Israeli airstrikes on Houthi targets in Yemen.

Everything you need to know about how biased they are is in these paragraphs.

The Israeli military said it had struck military targets. The Hodeidah and Ras Issa ports, however, are critical for delivering food and other necessities to the Yemeni population, who depend on imports. About 70 percent of Yemen’s commercial imports and 80 percent of its humanitarian assistance passes through Hodeidah, Ras Issa, and Salif ports, which United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Resident Representative Auke Lootsma said are “absolutely crucial to commercial and humanitarian activities.” Rosemary DiCarlo, under-secretary-general for the UN Department of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs, described the ports as a “lifeline for millions of people” that should be “open and operating.”

The Hezyaz power station is the central power station of Sanaa, providing electricity to the city’s population. After the attack, power across the city was cut for one to two days, and has been cutting in and out since according to three people who spoke to Human Rights Watch.

Deliberate attacks on objects indispensable to survival are war crimes.

This is not the first time Israeli forces have attacked critical infrastructure in Yemen. ....

The Houthis’ drone strikes and missile attacks on Israel, if deliberately or indiscriminately attacking civilians or civilian objects, may also amount to war crimes.

HRW is quite deliberately twisting and ignoring international law.

The entire text doesn't admit that Israel's targets are critical for Houthi military activity and therefore valid military objectives. That means that attacking them is certainly not a war crime - it is absolutely allowed under international law.

For example, the Eritrea-Ethiopia Claims Commission wrote about an Ethiopian attack on an Eritrean power plant:

On May 28, 2000, two Ethiopian jet aircraft dropped seven bombs that hit and seriously damaged the Hirgigo Power Station, which is located about ten kilometers from the port city of Massawa. .... Eritrea asserted that the bombing of the plant was unlawful because the plant was not a legitimate military objective, and it requested that the Commission hold Ethiopia liable to compensate Eritrea for the damage caused to Eritrea by that violation of international humanitarian law. ....The Commission, by a majority, has no doubt that the port and naval base at Massawa were military objectives. It follows that the generating facilities providing the electric power needed to operate them were objects that made an effective contribution to military action.

International law goes beyond that case to even attack economic targets beyond power plants.

Australia’s Defence Force Manual includes as military objectives "power stations [and] industry which support military operations " but also adds that “economic targets that indirectly but effectively support operations are also military objectives if an attack will gain a definite military advantage”.

Belgium’s Law of War Manual says "resistance also depends on the economic power of the adversary (its war industry, its production capacity, its sources of supply, etc.); in short, its economic potential. The breaking up of this economic potential has of course a direct influence on the armed forces’ capacity to resist, so that this economic potential also becomes a war objective."

Germany’s Military Manual provides that military objectives include, in particular, “economic objectives which make an effective contribution to military action."

Sweden IHL Manual states, "How and to what extent a given object can effectively contribute to the adversary’s military operations must be decided by the commander. This need not imply that the property in question is being used by the adversary for a given operation . . . It may even be a question of . . . energy resources or factories that indirectly contribute to the adversary’s military operations."

The US Naval Handbook says "Proper economic targets for naval attack include enemy lines of communication, rail yards, bridges, rolling stock, barges, lighters, industrial installations producing war-fighting products, and power generation plants. Economic targets of the enemy that indirectly but effectively support and sustain the enemy’s war-fighting capability may also be attacked.."

Ports and power plants, along with industrial buildings, roads, bridges and anything else the military uses are valid objects for attack as long as the attacks respect proportionality. HRW is knowingly lying when it flatly accuses Israel of war crimes. HRW is twisting international law to only condemn Israel.

Furthermore, HRW claims that mentions that the Hezyaz power station is "indispensable to survival" while admitting that Yemen civilians were only without power for a day or two. It makes up a new definition of "indispensable" just to be able to accuse Israel of war crimes. (This would be part of a proportionality calculation, and attacks that are not intended to hurt civilians are not war crimes even if disproportionate, which this attack wasn't.)

It brings no evidence that humanitarian aid to Yemen was affected by the attacks on the ports.

To add insult to injury, after declaring Israel 100% guilty of war crimes, HRW offhandedly mentions that the hundreds of Houthi drones and missiles shot at Israeli civilian areas - with deadly results - only "may be" war crimes.

HRW never wrote an article solely on Houthi attacks on Israel. The only times it mentions those attacks are to add a sentence of faux objectivity to reports falsely condemning Israel.

This is not a major HRW report. But it proves that, like Amnesty, Human Rights Watch is obsessively anti-Israel to the extent that it will knowingly misrepresent international law just to damn Israel.