Israel strikes on Syria against international law: UN experts

An aerial view shows a Syrian man waving the independence-era flag Syrian flag at Damascus' central Umayyad Square on December 11, 2024. Photo / AFP

• United Nations experts claim Israel’s strikes on Syria violate international law, branding them as “lawless”.
• Israel has conducted hundreds of strikes against Syrian military assets, aiming to prevent weapons reaching rebels.
• UN special rapporteur Ben Saul criticised the strikes, stating there’s no legal basis for pre-emptive disarmament.

Israel’s strikes on Syria following the fall of longtime President Bashar Al-Assad violate international law, United Nations experts said on Wednesday, branding Israel’s attempts to “pre-emptively disarm” its foes as “lawless”.

Since Assad’s ouster, Israel, which borders Syria, has sent troops into a buffer zone on the east of the Israeli-annexed Golan Heights, in a move the UN has said violates a 1974 armistice.

And Israel’s military said it had conducted hundreds of strikes against Syrian military assets in the past two days, claiming to target everything from chemical weapons stores to air defences to keep them out of rebel hands.

“There is absolutely no basis under international law to preventively or pre-emptively disarm a country you don’t like,” said Ben Saul, UN special rapporteur on the promotion of human rights while countering terrorism.

“If that were the case, it would be a recipe for global chaos,” he told reporters in Geneva, pointing out that “lots of countries have adversaries they would like to see without weapons”.

“This is completely lawless.”

Saul, who like other special rapporteurs is an independent expert who does not speak on behalf of the UN, said Israel’s strikes on neighbouring Lebanon were different, “because there is a hot conflict there”.

Israel stepped up its campaign in south Lebanon in late September after nearly a year of cross-border exchanges begun by Hezbollah in support of Hamas following its Palestinian ally’s October 7, 2023 attack on southern Israel.

While Assad was propped up by Lebanon’s Hezbollah militant group, along with Russia and Iran, Saul decried that the current strikes were “a continuation of what Israel has been doing in Syria for at least a decade”.

He pointed to “many, many hundreds of preventative attacks” launched by Israeli forces into Syria over the years against Hezbollah weapons dumps and storage facilities, despite the fact that the Lebanon-based militants were not attacking Israel from Syria.

“That would be the only circumstance in which it could use self-defence against Hezbollah in Syria,” Saul said.

“But you can’t just follow your enemy wherever they are in the world, and bomb them in some third country, which has been Israel’s approach.”

George Katrougalos, the UN special rapporteur on the promotion of democratic and equitable international order, meanwhile described Israel’s actions in Syria as “part of a pattern”.

“It is another case of the lawlessness that Israel demonstrates in the area: attacks without provocation against a sovereign state.”

– Agence France-Presse