Monday, March 23, 2026
Elder of Ziyon
On February 24, 2022 — the first day of Russia's invasion of Ukraine — a Russian Tochka ballistic missile with a cluster munition warhead struck outside a hospital in Vuhledar, killing four civilians and wounding ten, six of them healthcare workers. HRW published a full report the very next day. It named the victims, interviewed the hospital's chief doctor, identified the weapon from remnants, and laid out the legal case under customary international humanitarian law — noting that Russia's non-signatory status to the 2008 Convention on Cluster Munitions was no excuse, since the prohibition on indiscriminate attacks applies to all parties regardless of treaty status. HRW's arms director Steve Goose called it "unlawful" and demanded Russia stop immediately.
It has now been three weeks since Iran shot its first cluster bomb missile at Israeli civilians, and HRW has not written a word.
Since February 28, 2026, Iran has fired approximately 850 ballistic missiles at Israel. According to the IDF Home Front Command, roughly 50 percent of those missiles — approximately 425 — have been armed with cluster munition warheads, releasing between 24 and 80 submunitions each across areas of up to 10 square kilometers. CNN's analysis of two separate Iranian cluster munition attacks confirmed impacts spread across areas of seven and eight miles respectively, falling at random on homes, businesses, roads and parks. The IDF has had to instruct Israeli citizens not to approach unexploded ordnance after attacks, because the duds function as landmines. Arms expert N.R. Jenzen-Jones of Armament Research Services reviewed the pattern of strikes and concluded that these warheads have no "clear military purpose" and are being used "primarily to sow terror amongst a civilian population."
Israelis have been killed by these bombs. Yaron and Ilana Moshe, a couple in their seventies in Ramat Gan, were killed after a cluster warhead struck their building. Two construction workers were struck by submunitions at a work site in Yehud. Nine civilians were killed in a single strike on a residential neighborhood in Beit Shemesh. Three women were killed in a beauty salon in Beit Awwa. A Thai agricultural worker was killed by submunition shrapnel at Moshav Adanim. In total, at least 18 Israelis have been killed and over 3,700 wounded by Iranian attacks — the vast majority involving cluster munitions.
HRW has not found the time to write a single word about these.
The weapons Iran is using against Israel fall squarely within the definition of cluster munitions under the Convention on Cluster Munitions: conventional munitions designed to disperse explosive submunitions each weighing less than 20 kilograms. Iranian warheads carry submunitions of approximately 8 kilograms each. Iranian warheads carry between 24 and 80 submunitions with no self-destruct capability. Iran, like Russia, has not signed the convention. As with Russia, that is legally beside the point: the customary IHL prohibition on indiscriminate attacks applies regardless.
HRW wrote about and condemned a single cluster bomb missile in Ukraine within one day. They have not written about Iran's hundreds of similar missiles targeting Israeli civilians in three weeks.
What it has published on Israeli conduct in this war includes a report calling Israeli white phosphorus use in an evacuated Lebanese town "unlawful" — despite HRW's own admission that it could not verify a single civilian was present. It includes a report on the Minab school strike that keeps Israel in the headline despite Israel's denial and overwhelming evidence of American responsibility. And it includes a general statement from February 28 noting that HRW was "currently investigating" all parties — an investigation that, three weeks later, has produced reports exclusively targeting Israeli and American conduct.
HRW did publish one report on Iranian attacks on civilians in this war: a March 17 investigation documenting Iranian drone and missile attacks on Gulf states — Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, the UAE, Saudi Arabia. Those attacks killed approximately 21 civilians across all those countries combined.
As far as I can tell, none of the missiles exploded in the Gulf states included cluster munitions.
Human Rights Watch co-founded and chairs the Cluster Munition Coalition. It has spent decades building the legal and advocacy architecture that makes cluster munition use a recognized war crime. It applied that architecture to Russia within 24 hours of a single strike killing four people. It has declined to apply it to Iran after 425 strikes over three weeks killing and wounding thousands.
That is not an oversight. An organization with HRW's expertise and institutional focus on cluster munitions does not accidentally fail to notice 425 ballistic missile cluster strikes on a civilian population. It notices. It chooses not to report.
The question that follows — why — is one HRW should be asked to answer publicly. But the pattern itself, across this conflict and others, already contains the answer.
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