The Israeli army’s spraying of chemical substances over vast agricultural areas in southern Lebanon and Syria amounts to a “war crime,” the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor said Thursday.
Beirut accused Israel on Wednesday of spraying the herbicide glyphosate on the Lebanese side of their shared border, with President Joseph Aoun decrying a "crime against the environment.”
More than a year after a ceasefire was struck to end a war between Israel and Hezbollah, border areas in Lebanon remain largely deserted and Israel continues to carry out regular airstrikes in the south.
After collecting samples following the recent spraying, the Lebanese agriculture and environment ministries said some of them showed concentrations of glyphosate "20 to 30 times higher than the average" in the area.
In a joint statement, they expressed worries about "damage to agricultural production" and soil fertility.
Aoun denounced the spraying as a "flagrant violation of Lebanese sovereignty and a crime against the environment and health.”
The UN peacekeeping mission in Lebanon, UNIFIL, said Monday that it had been notified by Israel of its plans to spray a "non-toxic chemical substance" near the border and warned to take shelter.
“The deliberate targeting of civilian farmland violates international humanitarian law, particularly the prohibition on attacking or destroying objects indispensable to civilian survival,” said the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor Thursday.
“Large-scale destruction of private property without specific military necessity amounts to a war crime and undermines food security and basic livelihoods in the affected areas,” it added.
Euro-Med Monitor also said that it documented Israeli aircraft spraying pesticides of unknown composition over farmland in the countryside of Quneitra in southern Syria last month.
“The direct targeting of civilian objects caused widespread crop destruction, posing a serious threat to economic and food security and violating farmers’ rights to work and to an adequate standard of living by destroying their primary sources of income without military justification,” it added.
The Monitor called on the international community “to act immediately by establishing an independent fact-finding mission to collect samples from affected soil and crops in southern Lebanon and the countryside of Quneitra, subject them to thorough laboratory analysis, determine the chemical composition of the substances used, assess their toxicity, and evaluate any potential violation of the Chemical Weapons Convention or relevant international environmental protocols.”
