The Syrian government’s campaign to clear rebels from the city of Aleppo by pummeling residential neighborhoods with so-called barrel bombs constitutes a war crime because the weapons cannot be aimed at combatants, according to a detailed report released Monday by the advocacy group Human Rights Watch.
The report, which cataloged what it said were 266 bombings that affected 340 different sites around the city from Nov. 1, 2013, to the end of February this year, provided a legal rationale for viewing the barrel bombs, which often are nothing more than barrels filled with explosives dropped from helicopters, as different from other munitions used in the war.
“Use of barrel bombs in residential neighborhoods has done the expected: killed hundreds of civilians and driven thousands from their homes,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, the group’s Middle East director. “If these indiscriminate dumb weapons managed to hit a military target, it would be sheer luck.”
The use of a weapon that can’t be aimed violates long-established laws on the conduct of war, the report argues.
Israeli forces launched a large-scale operation in the Qalandiya refugee camp in occupied East Jerusalem on...
Israeli ministers and lawmakers led a march towards the Gaza Strip on Sunday, calling for the...
As first light reaches the scattered tents and animal pens of Ras al-Ahmar in the northern...
Dr Mazen Rantisi, a 71-year-old Palestinian physician popularly described as the “doctor of the poor”, says...
