Israel Is Using U.S. Bombs in Lebanon to Commit
Alleged War Crimes
The families of Lebanese civilians killed with
American “bunker busters” want to hold both Israel and the U.S. accountable
Hind Hassan
Apr 24, 2025
https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/lebanon-unitedstates-israel-weapons
Mohammad Haidar, 21, says his parents, Fatima Fekiyeh
and Abbas Haidar, spent twenty years trying to have a child before he was born.
Five
years later, they had his sister, Hasnah, who completed their small family.
They lived in southern Lebanon, in a house near the village of Seksekiyeh.
Fatima and Abbas marked forty years of marriage last year in the village,
where, Mohammad says, their life was idyllic, only sharing the land with horses
and chickens.
Everything has been upended by
Israeli bombardment.
Hezbollah began firing rockets
and artillery at Israeli military posts one day after Israel began its assault
on Gaza in October 2023. Israel bombed Lebanon, mostly in the south, with the
low-level cross border attacks continuing for nearly a year. In September,
Israel escalated the conflict into an all-out war. Bombs began raining down on
large parts of Lebanon, including the south, causing widespread devastation and
leaving entire towns in ruins. In total, more than 4,000 Lebanese
people were killed and 1.2
million displaced.
Mohammad said his family
planned to flee to Beirut on September 23. That same day, Israel launched one
of the most intense aerial bombardment campaigns in recent warfare. The family
never made it to the capital.
Mohammed recounted his
attempts to flee from this ongoing bombardment to Al Jazeera English’s
documentary program Fault Lines. “My father went to pick up our
relatives so we can all leave for Beirut,” he said. “We wanted to escape the
planes. I went to the third floor, and I had just finished eating. I was just
about to get up when suddenly I saw the entire house collapsing.” He continued,
“it was like a rainstorm, but the color was gray. As soon as I hit the ground,
I was gone. I was unconscious. At first I had no idea what happened. I didn't
think it was a missile or anything like that. But, then, I woke up, I started
to scream, tried to move. I realized I could not get up.”
Mohammad was trapped
underground for seven hours. “Death is easier than being stuck under rubble,”
he recalled, “you can’t breathe, you can’t move, all of the stones are on top
of you.” As people arrived to help, he could hear his father’s voice through the
chaos, alongside the relentless sound of bombs falling nearby. “My father was
asking me if my mother and sister were next to me. I said I didn't know, and
then I was unconscious. I was coming in and out of consciousness because I was
having a hard time breathing.”
When Mohammad was finally
pulled from the wreckage, emergency workers rushed him to a hospital.
Initially, news of his mother and sister’s fate was kept from him. He learned
the next day that both had been killed, after seeing a memorial photo of his
15-year-old sister, Hasnah, posted online. Her body had been found three hours
after the initial strike, but his mother’s body has never been recovered. “My
mother, may God rest her soul, she’s still inside the stones,” he said, “we
haven’t found her. Not even a single part of her. Maybe the missile fell on her
and she evaporated. No one knows.” For months, Mohammad documented the ongoing
search for her body in videos he posted on TikTok.
He says it’s taken a toll on
his father, who remains trapped in a constant state of shock. “He cannot accept
what happened. Every single day he comes to search,” Mohammed told Fault
Lines, “when he reaches here, he starts to cry. His home, his sweat and
tears, his family—it’s all gone.”
Evidence for War Crimes
No one has explained to
Mohammad or his father why his home was bombed. The Israeli military has
repeatedly claimed, on social media
and in public statements,
that it targets Hezbollah facilities and fighters, but it has not commented on
this specific attack. Mohammad says his family are not Hezbollah members or
fighters, and there’s no evidence to suggest otherwise.
“As you can see, it’s a normal
house. We have nothing to do with anyone; we’re living alone here. They convey
to the media that these are Hezbollah targets. But in reality, that’s not
true.”
Only the frame of Mohammad’s
house remains—lying in ruin among rocks, stones, and twisted metal—and stands
alone in the center of their once-gated land. The destruction of the civilian
home did not unveil any tunnels, reveal any weapon storage facilities, or
unearth any militant activity.
Among the debris, Fault
Lines found shrapnel and large metal casings, which were photographed
and sent to forensic investigators at Airwars, a watchdog tracking civilian
harm in conflict-affected nations. They partnered with Armament Research
Services to analyze the munitions.
Emily Tripp, Airwars’s
director, says the footage showed evidence of a JDAM (Joint Direct Attack
Munition) kit: “it's a piece of material that attaches onto a
specific munition and allows it to hit a very particular coordinate. So from
that, we know that there must have been coordinates essentially plugged into
the targeting system in order for that bomb to have been dropped.”
JDAMs are American-made, as
are most of the bombs attached to them. U.S.-manufactured weapons used by
Israel in Lebanon have killed many civilians, including Mohammad’s mother and
sister. Airwars identified the weapon that struck Mohammed’s house as a BLU-109,
a 2,000 pound bomb in a category known as “bunker busters.” These bombs can
penetrate hardened structures—including concrete, steel, and rock—before
detonating, and they have been used by the U.S.
in Afghanistan and Iraq, and by
Israel in Gaza—with devastating consequences.
The BLU-109 is considered a
“dumb bomb,” meaning it cannot navigate once released, but when paired with a
JDAM, it becomes a “precision-guided munition,” capable of adjusting course
mid-flight using GPS coordinates to hit a specific location. This suggests that
Mohammad’s home was intentionally targeted.
Tripp adds: “We have found no
evidence, based on our review of the online information environment, around
connections between this family and Hezbollah. This is a typical situation in
that a military will make a decision, drop a bomb, and assume that nobody will
say anything afterwards.”
We shared our findings and
evidence with Dearbhla Minogue, a senior lawyer at the UK-based Global Legal
Action Network (GLAN), an independent organization whose work includes pursuing
cases involving serious human rights violations. Minogue confirmed that, based
on the available evidence and without an explanation from Israel, the attack
could constitute a war crime.
Mohammad’s story is just one
of many in a war that has resulted in widespread civilian casualties, often
caused by U.S.-supplied munitions.
Fault Lines emailed
the Israeli military’s press office to ask why Mohammad Haidar’s home—a
civilian residence—was struck. They did not respond.
America’s Role
In the United States, the
Leahy Law prohibits
the U.S. government from providing military assistance to foreign military
units credibly accused of gross human rights violations. Human Rights
watchdogs, like Human
Rights Watch and Amnesty
International, have called for Israel to be investigated for war crimes,
and accused it of committing genocide during its assault on Gaza. Despite this,
Israel continues to receive more U.S.
weapons annually than any other country.
For years, massive arms
shipments to Israel have received wide bipartisan support in Washington. The
Trump administration has approved around $12 billion worth
of arms to Israel since January alone, while just months earlier, the Biden
administration authorized the export of
thousands of JDAMs—like the one found at Mohammad Haidar’s home.
Democratic Senator Mark Kelly
has repeatedly spoken in favor of
providing these weapons to Israel. Fault Lines spoke to him on
his way to a committee meeting in February and asked him about his advocacy for
the sale of JDAMs. He explained that: “JDAM is a much more precise weapon,
helps you hit the target and to avoid collateral damage.”
However, Josh Paul, a former
State Department official who resigned over U.S. arms transfers to Israel in
October 2023, argues that Gaza serves as evidence that Israel has no interest
in that type of precision, and he underscored American responsibility: “The
reality is that every bomb dropped, every tank that rolls through Gaza, and
every missile fired from U.S.-made aircraft carries with it the weight of
American policy decisions. And, in many cases, we are complicit in those
actions, whether we want to acknowledge it or not.”
In his role, Paul worked on
vetting arms sales. He says the process changed when weapons were sold to
Israel after October 7th: “Any space for debate, discussion, for remediating
possible bad outcomes went away, because the whole process was flipped on its
head […] it wasn't, we are not going to be asking you for your approval. It
was, ‘you must approve this’, and there were deadlines.”
The bombs were approved and
widely used: the type of 2,000-pound bomb that destroyed Mohammad Haidar’s home
was also reportedly dropped
on Lebanon’s capital Beirut—just days later.
Celebrated by Leaders, The
Strike That Killed a Family
At around 6 p.m., on September
27, 2024, Amira Zaydan stood on her balcony in Beirut when she saw smoke rising
in the distance. The smoke was drifting from the southern suburb of Dahiyeh,
where her mother, father, and brother lived in an apartment. Turning to her
husband she said, “I think my family is dead.”
A series of “bunker buster”
bombs had been dropped by the Israeli military on the Haret Hreik municipality.
Israel later claimed it had struck Hezbollah’s "central headquarters,”
allegedly located "under residential buildings.” The strike killed
Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah and was celebrated by then-U.S. President Joe
Biden, who called it “a measure of justice.”
But this was the same attack
that killed Amira’s family.
She rushed to the site of the
bombing. “When I got there after the strikes, I was just screaming because the
site was catastrophic. The Red Cross wanted to take me to the hospital because
I fell to the ground a few times.”
Emergency crews, overwhelmed
by the scale of the destruction left by the 2,000-pound American-made bombs,
could not locate her family. That night, Amira returned to the site, and she
found her uncle holding a flashlight, digging with his bare hands and calling
out her father’s name. It took five days for their bodies to be recovered.
Her brother, 22-year-old
Mohammad Zaydan, was found first. “They asked me if I wanted to identify the
body, and I agreed. I wasn't prepared for what I was about to see. I entered
the room, and as soon as they opened the bag he was in, I glanced quickly and
started to scream. I didn't want to see if it was him or not. My uncle came and
started to rub [my brother’s] head, but then his skin came off. At first, I
said it wasn’t my brother. I didn't want to accept that this was him.”
“We tried to lift his eyelids
to see if it was him, but we didn’t find any eyeballs. His eyes had exploded.”
The next day, emergency
workers found her father, Wissam Zaydan, and then her mother, Mona Al Shaker.
“My uncle told the rescue workers to work delicately. Once they recovered the
couch, they found my mother sitting on it. When they tried to move her, the top
of her head fell off, it had melted.”
Her tone is fast and detached,
Amira recounted the details as though they belong to someone else, until she
broke down when recalling her final exchange with her mother. “That morning I
sent her a message telling her to forgive me if anything happened to me. She
said don’t speak like this. I swear, I felt like something was going to happen.
I told her I wanted to go over there.”
She added: “Israel did this.
They say that they had warned us, but they didn’t. They didn’t warn us about
that initial strike on September 27.”
Amira says there were other
families living in the building who also died. The total number of civilians
killed remains unclear, but Fault Lines has verified that at
least seven civilians were killed in the same attack.
Absence of Accountability
Despite the immense loss and
grief, Amira is not expecting justice.
“We say God-willing whoever
did that to our parents and other people will feel this pain and more. If he’s
[Joe Biden] saying that we achieved justice by assassinating Hassan
Nasrallah—what justice could they have achieved by killing civilians? He killed
innocent and oppressed people, like my family.”
Both Israel and the U.S. are
not parties to the International Criminal Court (ICC). Additionally, the U.S.
holds veto power at the United Nations Security Council, and Israel does not
cooperate fully with international bodies. As a result, Amira and Mohammad are
unlikely to bring accountability to fruition through international mechanisms.
Mohammad Haidar is also not
expecting answers, but he does have a message for the U.S. government.
“The weapons being sent to
Israel are killing innocent people as you have seen. Boys, girls—they’re
killing everything. Elderly people, animals. They’re uprooting the trees. This
isn’t right. They should not be selling them any weapons, or give them anything
else.”
