The following is a comment posted by Brenda Herd, one of our readers, regarding an article I put up the other day entitled, Hezbollah Responds to Israeli Saber Rattling. The article referenced two recently published reports, both containing Israeli allegations that Hezbollah presently is using people living in villages in southern Lebanon as “human shields.”
Herd is the author of the recently-published book, Hezbollah: An Outsider’s Inside View, and she also maintains the website, Friends of Lebanon.
By Brenda Herd
The Jerusalem Post’s phrase “Hezbollah’s battle doctrine of using civilian built-up areas as military bases to rain death and destruction upon Israel” is ludicrous. Or should we cheer the fact that the Post chose not to use the trite accusation of “human shields” and instead chose to merely imply as much? Let’s look at July 2006 to assess Hezbollah’s “battle doctrine.”
First, it should be noted that a UN HRC post-war investigation concluded that while there was “some evidence that Hezbollah used towns and villages as “shields” for their firings. At the same time, evidence points to such use when most of the civilian population had departed the area. The Commission found no evidence regarding the use of ‘human shields’ by Hezbollah.” (23 November 2006, A/HRC/3/2)
This point is corroborated by a 2008 report by the Strategic Studies Institute—part of the US Army War College, hardly sympathetic to Hezbollah– which concludes: “the villages Hezbollah used to anchor its defensive system in southern Lebanon were largely evacuated by the time Israeli ground forces crossed the border on July 18. As a result, the key battlefields in the land campaign south of the Litani River were mostly devoid of civilians, and IDF participants consistently report little or no meaningful intermingling of Hezbollah fighters and noncombatants. Nor is there any systematic reporting of Hezbollah using civilians in the combat zone as shields. The fighting in southern Lebanon was chiefly urban, in the built-up areas of the small to medium-size villages and towns typical of the region. But it was not significantly intermingled with a civilian population that had fled by the time the ground fighting began. Hezbollah made very effective use of local cover and concealment (see below), but this was obtained almost entirely from the terrain—both natural and man-made.”
The report further notes that “In 2006, the great majority of Hezbollah’s fighters wore uniforms. In fact, their equipment and clothing were remarkably similar to many state militaries’—desert or green fatigues, helmets, web vests, body armor, dog tags, and rank insignia. On occasion, IDF units hesitated to fire on Hezbollah parties in the open because their kit, from a distance, looked so much like IDF infantry’s.” (“The 2006 Lebanon Campaign and the Future of Warfare: Implications for Army and Defense Policy,” by Stephen Biddle and Jeffrey A Friedman, 25 Sept 2008.)
Lastly, in contrast to the approximately 1000 Lebanese civilians and 250 combatants killed by Israeli forces, it is worth noting that the July War resulted in a maximum count of only 44 Israeli civilians—and 119 IDF soldiers. These statistics alone indicate that Israeli military targets (rather than Israeli civilian) were first and foremost to the Lebanese Resistance. And the other way around for the Israeli forces.
Uprooted Palestinian 
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