Israeli ‘double tap’ strikes in Gaza and Lebanon ‘raise serious ethical and legal concerns’

On Oct. 18, Wafaa Thaher heard a loud explosion outside the apartment where she was staying. She quickly did what many in Gaza have become accustomed to doing — she pointed her camera outside her window and started recording.

A teenager was lying on the ground, in an area near the Jabaliya refugee camp in northern Gaza. He seemed to have been injured in an earlier Israeli airstrike and was waving his arm for help.

“He seems like a child,” Thaher can be heard saying to her father in the recording. “This is awful. How awful. He’s in pieces. He’s in pieces. Why did they hit him?”

A group of people gathered around to help. Then, suddenly, a second strike hit, killing the boy and at least one other person, according to Nebal Farsakh, a spokesperson for the Palestinian Red Crescent Society. More than 20 others were also wounded.

The video, which was later authenticated by the Washington Post, appears to show serious violations of humanitarian law, according to experts.

The attack has the characteristics of a tactic known as “double tap.” It’s a military term that’s used to describe when a strike hits a target, and then after a few minutes, another one follows. These usually kill rescue workers, journalists or anyone who rushes to the site to help. They can be two airstrikes or a combination of an airstrike and a drone attack.

Lawyers have said that it can be a violation of international law, and as some have argued in the past, a possible war crime. Experts agree and say that cases will need to be examined individually.

The incident in Jabaliya seems not to be a one-off event. Video footage, witness testimonies and news reports suggest that the Israeli military may have carried out more of these strikes in Gaza and even Lebanon.

But the evidence clearly shows that, in Gaza and Lebanon, successive Israeli strikes on or near sites that were previously hit have led to the deaths and injuries of individuals who may not have been the main target, and that the strikes hampered rescue operations.

The Israeli military says it only targets militants and accuses them of hiding among civilians. It didn’t comment on specific examples that The World shared with them.

But in response to questions about the allegations of double tap strikes and strikes on civilians, it said that it is “committed to mitigating civilian harm during operational activity. In that spirit, the IDF makes great efforts to estimate and consider potential civilian collateral damage in its strikes.” It added that it is “fully committed to respecting all applicable international legal obligations, including the Law of Armed Conflict.”

Similar cases

Airwars, a civilian harm watchdog organization based in the UK, has tracked and documented airstrikes in places like Iraq, Syria, Yemen and Ukraine. It is now collecting data on strikes in Gaza and Lebanon.

It uses open source information and eyewitness testimonies as part of its documentation.

“There’s a digital ripple effect that will occur as soon as there is any explosion,” Director Emily Tripp said, “where you start to see information come online. And we try and capture that.” 

There is plenty of information on this war, she added. Families post details about lost loved ones online, and Palestinian journalists have been reporting and documenting events at great risk to their own lives.

The challenge, she added, is the amount of information and the frequency of events.

“We have documented more strikes in the last year than we had in any other comparable conflict in over a decade,” Tripp said.

In the first three weeks of the war alone, there were at least four alleged cases of double tap strikes in Gaza, according to testimonies and data collected by Airwars.

Tripp insists this is a small fraction of the data that they have been able to process so far.

“It will be many years before I can give you a comprehensive picture of what we’ve seen,” Tripp explained.

“We’ve seen a few cases of people rescuing others from the rubble, and then a strike happens again, kind of in the same location. And there’s such cruelty in that [they] are people trying to find their loved ones or trying to recover the dead, and the ability to recover the dead with dignity is suddenly hampered by a following wave of strikes.”

Listen to Airwars director Emily Tripp describe the work and goal of documenting strikes in Gaza and Lebanon.

Others have been reporting similar incidents.

In July, moments after first responders arrived at the scene of an Israeli airstrike in the al-Mawasi area in southern Gaza, a second strike hit directly in front of two clearly marked emergency vehicles.

Eyewitnesses captured the moment on video, which later was verified by the New York Times.

The Israel Defense Forces said the strike targeted Hamas officials, and it will investigate the second strike. At least 90 people were killed and 300 wounded in total, the Gaza Health Ministry reported.

In June, a report by the United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem and Israel, described an attack resembling a double tap strike, involving a convoy of vehicles evacuating residents from a designated safe route in Gaza on Oct. 13, 2023.

Israeli forces denied targeting the convoy, but an independent investigation by Airwars quoted an ammunition expert who said that the attack was probably carried out with “a precision-guided shrapnel-delivered missile.” He added “if that is the case, then the attack would have been carried out by the Israelis.”

It’s difficult to know the exact extent of the deaths and injuries caused by these attacks. Israel does not allow international journalists to report independently inside Gaza.

“When we arrive, the airstrikes follow”

Three days after Israel’s incursion into Lebanon, Ghassan Zheim, an operation manager with the Lebanese Civil Defense, rushed to the site of an airstrike in the Dahiyeh neighborhood, south of the capital Beirut.

“There was a big fire,” he recalled.

As the rescue workers were busy putting out the fire, another strike hit, killing two of Zheim’s colleagues.

“We picked them out from under the rubble,” he said.

Zheim and another rescue worker, Ayman Taher, described what seems to have become a pattern: Whenever they arrive at a location to start rescue operations, Israeli airstrikes follow.

Taher recalled another recent incident, where a second strike hit about 14 minutes after the first one. The rescuers said they felt targeted.

Taher said they have come up with ways to help minimize risk. They first send someone on a motorbike to monitor the situation. Once it all seems clear, rescue workers arrive with their equipment. They have set up a WhatsApp group chat to communicate, Taher said.

Lebanon’s health minister, Firass Abiad, confirmed to The World that Israel has carried out double tap strikes that have killed and injured rescue workers. He said that these attacks have led to a disruption of emergency services.

“There [have] been several instances where we did not allow the first responders to go out,” he explained, “because it was clear that they [would] be targeted. And there [have] also been direct threats by the Israelis on certain health care responders, where they clearly said that they will target them if they are on the road.”

Hezbollah, the Shia militant group in Lebanon, has frequently lobbed rockets into northern Israel since October of last year. The Israeli military has accused the group of using ambulances to transport fighters and hospitals to hide weapons and equipment.

Abiad responded to the accusation saying that the military had not shown strong evidence for its claim.

“If you believe that these ambulances are being used for military reasons you need to show the proof or elicit a warning to be investigated. But you cannot target them just because these ambulances carry the opposite side’s flag.”

Human Rights Watch looked into accusations that weapons and equipment were being stored in three medical facilities.

“Human Rights Watch did not find any evidence indicating use of these three facilities for military purposes at the time of the attacks that would justify depriving them of their protected status under international humanitarian law,” the report said.

“Under international law, rescue workers and medical personnel are afforded protections in order to enable them to do their work,” said Ramzi Kaiss, Lebanon researcher for Human Rights Watch.

“When going out and doing your job as a paramedic becomes dangerous, it has a ripple effect on the community,” he added.

Listen to Dr. Firass Abiad, Lebanon’s minister of health, commenting on the seriousness of alleged Israeli strikes on rescue workers in Lebanon.

Warning or possible war crime?

The Israeli military has reportedly conducted double tap strikes in the past. A team of independent international medical experts investigated allegations of civilian harm in Israel’s war in Gaza in 2014. They found that “double tap or multiple consecutive strikes on a single location led to multiple civilian casualties and to injuries and deaths among rescuers.”

The Israeli military sometimes describes multiple strikes as warning shots, but in the double tap cases that have been reported, an initial strike led to deaths and injuries and then a second strike hit after people or rescuers gathered.

Experts say giving warnings doesn’t mean the military can do away with its other obligations under international law.

“Civilians have no obligation to flee their homes and they retain all their legal protections if they choose to stay,” said Adil Haque, professor of law at Rutgers University.

“An attacking force always has a legal obligation to verify that its targets are lawful and to avoid unnecessary or disproportionate harm to civilians,” Haque added. “It must give warnings prior to attacks whenever possible, but it still has to look and see whether civilians have heeded a warning or remain in harm’s way. It cannot assume that all or most civilians have left.”

Haque, whose research focuses on the international law of armed conflict, explained that double tap strikes are “always extremely alarming and very hard to justify.”

Listen to Adil Haque’s reaction to the video of what appears to be a double tap strike near the Jabaliya Refugee camp on Oct. 18.

Haque also raised concerns about Iran and Hezbollah’s attacks on Israel. He said that Iran’s missile strikes “violated the UN Charter, which permits the use of force in self-defense but prohibits retaliation or reprisal.”

He added that “many of Hezbollah’s rocket attacks on Israel violate international humanitarian law because they are directed at civilian areas or are so inaccurate as to be indiscriminate. At the same time, many of Hezbollah’s attacks appear directed at military targets.”

“We allowed this to happen”

Double tap attacks have been used in past wars. The CIA has been accused of using them and so have groups like Hamas and the Taliban.

“We saw this also of course with Irish terror tactics against the United Kingdom and that’s where the phrase double tap initially originated … [this idea] that you could do this follow-up strike in order to target the ambulance men, the medics, the disaster relief people, those who are actually trying to save lives,” said Keir Giles, with Chatham House, a think tank based in the UK.

“It’s a tactic that you see wherever Russia goes to war, not just Russia of course, but Russia makes it a central part of its strategy because the way Russia wins wars is to terrorize the civilian population into submission,” he said.

Double tap strikes were a regular occurrence during the war in Syria. After the uprisings of 2011, Russia and Iran rushed to the assistance of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Russian jets pounded opposition areas, sometimes using this tactic.

Dr. Houssam al-Nahhas remembers that time vividly. He worked at a hospital in Aleppo between 2012 and 2014.

“It was very unusual to not experience an airstrike in more than a week,” he said, adding that sometimes double tap attacks happened on a daily basis.

“We became nervous in terms of rushing to help patients,” he recalled, “knowing that we need to secure our [own] safety, which means that patients and injured individuals would lose those golden minutes to save their lives.”

Today, al-Nahhas works as a health and human rights researcher at Physicians for Human Rights, and he helped put together a report as part of a complaint against Russia submitted to the UN Human Rights Committee last May.

Russia allegedly went on to use these types of strikes in Ukraine, which worries al-Nahhas.

“We allowed this to happen in Syria a decade ago,” he said, “and we started seeing them in Ukraine afterward, and now in Gaza, and then in Lebanon.”

It is not clear whether the Israeli military intentionally and systematically uses two or more strikes on or near an original target.

But it’s easier for potential violations to occur in an environment where emotions are high and accountability is seemingly not enforced to the full extent.

Michael Ofer Ziv served in the Israeli military, and for about three months, he was involved in the process of approving airstrikes in Gaza. He never entered the Gaza Strip, he said, but guided his brigade from just over the border.

Ofer Ziv said he doesn’t recall approving any double tap strikes. He said that hits on major targets like hospitals, schools and mosques were approved by higher-ups within the military.

But he said that since the Hamas attacks on Israel on Oct. 7 last year, which killed some 1,200 people and led to the capture of some 250 hostages, there has been “a sense of revenge” and “teaching Palestinians a lesson” among soldiers in the Israeli military.

Accountability, he added, seemed not to be a priority.

“When a commander makes the decision to punish [an Israeli soldier],” he said, “he [essentially] makes the decision to defend a Palestinian. And after [Oct.] 7, that’s not a very cool position to be in. You know, you don’t want to be that wuss that cares about the Palestinians after [Oct.] 7.”

Listen to Michael Ofer Ziv’s view on accountability in the Israeli military.

Ofer Ziv has refused to serve in the army since April.

Last month, he and some 140 other soldiers signed a letter addressed to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, declaring that they will not serve unless the government reaches a deal to free the Israeli hostages.

“We were 40 [in] April, we [were] 140 in September,” he said of the signatories. “Now, after [the letter] was published, we have people reaching out to us asking to sign as well. So, we are growing in numbers.”

“You have to pick and choose”

When an army carries out multiple strikes on a target, it is potentially violating international law in several different ways, said Yousuf Syed Khan, a nonresident senior fellow with the Atlantic Council.

“These attacks can violate the obligation to collect and care for the wounded and sick,” he explained, “and to respect rescuers and humanitarian relief personnel. The presence of humanitarian aid workers carrying out their humanitarian function during a double tap airstrike can also violate obligations to respect and protect civilian humanitarian relief personnel, as well as to respect and protect objects used for humanitarian relief, such as humanitarian aid convoys.”

Khan, who served at the UN for a decade investigating war crimes, added that the reports coming out of Lebanon and Gaza are worth exploring. But he also acknowledged that there is a long list of allegations of Israeli violations of international humanitarian law in Gaza and Lebanon.

“The number of allegations are so many that you almost have to pick and choose which one is being reported on,” Khan said. “You do have attacks against hospitals, you have the deliberate and arbitrary denial of humanitarian aid, you have starvation as a method of warfare, the International Criminal Court is saying this may amount to extermination of the Palestinian civilian population, you have allegations of a genocide before the International Court of Justice. So, it’s very sobering to say that sometimes double tap attacks are drowned out by other conduct that also reaches the threshold of war crimes.”

The World shared a list of alleged Israeli double tap strikes in Lebanon and Gaza with the US State Department, and asked if there are concerns at the department about the possibility of American weapons being used in violation of international law.

“We continue to make clear at the highest levels that Israel must not only comply with IHL [International Humanitarian Law] but must also take every feasible step to prevent civilian harm — this is a moral and strategic imperative,” a spokesperson wrote in response.

The spokesperson added “we consistently urged, and will continue to urge, Israel to investigate credible allegations of International Humanitarian Law (IHL) violations whenever they arise.”

Editor’s note: The World reached out to several Israeli law and military experts for comment for this story. Many of them were either unavailable or didn’t respond.