Former IDF chief Gantz: Hezbollah turned living rooms into missile rooms
By YONAH JEREMY BOB/J.post/05/04/2015
Speaking on Monday at Shurat Hadin’s conference on “Towards a New Law of War,” just retired IDF chief-of-staff Benny Gantz said that, “Hezbollah has turned villages into missile villages and living rooms into missile rooms.”
Gantz was summarizing the challenges of asymmetrical warfare being highlighted at the conference including terrorist groups’ abuse of the law of armed conflict such as using human shields or stationing weaponry in civilian homes,
Shurat Hadin’s Director Nitsana Darshan-Leitner said that the purpose of the conference was to try to help empower the IDF and other Western militaries to be able to fight more effectively against such terror groups by updating the law of armed conflict.
Gantz echoed some of those themes, saying he was making an unusual appearance as a civilian “about a very important issue being promoted here for all human kind, human rights and society.”
The former IDF chief stated, “war has changed. The civilian population became both the target of the terrorists and their human shield at the same time.”
Describing the difficulty of fighting terrorists who fight among civilians, Gantz said, “I sat with drone operators to distinguish between combatants and civilians,” noting it was often very difficult to tell the difference since Hamas also does not wear uniforms.
Gantz said the laws of war were “made to limit bad guys. But guess what – today the bad guys don’t care, so they are only limiting the good guys from fighting them.”
Despite the complexity of fighting adversaries who abuse the laws of war, he said that, “we do investigate ourselves on Gaza and Lebanon,” noting “the IDF checked 500 incidents during the summer Gaza War” with some incidents going to “military court.”
Gantz added, “We don’t do it for the world, we do it for us.”
