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Israeli strikes in Lebanon: three dead, and the law that judges all bloodshed
Israeli strikes on the south and east of Lebanon killed at least three people and wounded twenty-three, judged by the measure of the fifth commandment.
On the night of Friday 4 September, strikes hit the south and east of Lebanon. The Lebanese Health Ministry reports at least three dead and twenty-three wounded, spread across five localities in the regions of Tyre and Nabatieh, in the south, and the Bekaa, in the east. The Israeli army says it acted after a Hezbollah drone attack on its soldiers.
The toll remains provisional. A first count spoke of two killed in a drone strike on the town of Kfar Rumman, in the district of Nabatieh; it was then raised to at least three. Hezbollah did not immediately respond. Since 2 March, Israeli attacks have cost the lives of more than four thousand three hundred people in Lebanon.
The law that judges these acts is ancient and does not vary. “Thou shalt not kill,” says the fifth commandment. The Catechism of the Council of Trent teaches that this prohibition does not forbid every taking of life: the magistrate who punishes the guilty, the soldier who repels the just enemy do not sin, for they are ministers of the law. But the same authority that permits repelling the aggressor forbids striking the innocent along with him. The blood of one who has not borne arms is redeemed by no military necessity.
So the question is not who launched the first drone, which we do not claim to settle. It is what a riposte becomes when it falls upon five inhabited towns and makes, in a single night, three dead and twenty-three wounded. The very number of the dead heaped up since March, more than four thousand three hundred, is already the verdict: where one no longer counts, one no longer discerns, and where one no longer discerns the innocent from the guilty, war has ceased to be just. Blood shed without right cries out from the earth, like the blood of Abel, and it cries against him who has shed it.
Sources. Catechism of the Council of Trent (1566), on the fifth commandment “Thou shalt not kill”; Book of Genesis (IV, 10), the blood of Abel that cries to God from the earth, according to the Vulgate.