The Brief

Human Rights Watch has accused Israel of unlawfully deploying artillery-delivered white phosphorus munitions over the residential town of Yohmor in southern Lebanon on March 3, verified through geolocated images showing airburst detonations above homes. The strikes, which caused fires in at least two residences, came on the second day of renewed hostilities between Israel and Hezbollah — a conflict that has killed at least 394 people and displaced over 300,000 across Lebanon in the eight days since fighting resumed.

The Report

Human Rights Watch on Sunday published findings accusing Israel of firing M825-series 155mm white phosphorus artillery shells over a populated neighbourhood in Yohmor, a town in southern Lebanon, on March 3. The organisation verified and geolocated eight images showing characteristic airburst patterns — burning felt wedges dispersed across a diameter of 125 to 250 metres — over residential structures, with civil defence workers photographed extinguishing fires in at least two homes and a vehicle within 160 metres of the detonation points.

The munitions were deployed hours after Avichay Adraee, the Israeli military’s Arabic-language spokesperson, issued evacuation orders at 5:27 a.m. directing residents of Yohmor and more than 50 surrounding villages to move at least one kilometre from their homes into open land. A second order followed at 12:12 p.m. the same day. Human Rights Watch noted that evacuation orders do not relieve a military force of its obligations under international humanitarian law to distinguish between civilian and military targets and to take all feasible precautions against civilian harm.

Ramzi Kaiss, a Lebanon researcher at Human Rights Watch, described the use of airburst white phosphorus over residential areas as “extremely alarming,” stating that such deployment is “unlawfully indiscriminate” and fails to meet the requirements of international humanitarian law. The organisation called on the United States, United Kingdom, and Germany to suspend military assistance to Israel, and urged Lebanon to initiate domestic investigations and accede to the International Criminal Court.

The Israeli military said in a statement that it is “currently unaware and cannot confirm use of shells that contain white phosphorus in Lebanon as claimed,” adding that any weapons containing white phosphorus are used in accordance with international law. Israel has not ratified Protocol III of the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons, which restricts the use of incendiary weapons — though white phosphorus occupies a contested legal space, classified by militaries as a smoke and obscurant munition rather than a primarily incendiary weapon.

The incident occurred during the second day of resumed hostilities between Israel and Hezbollah, which reignited on March 2 after Hezbollah fired rockets and drones at an Israeli missile defence site south of Haifa — the first such cross-border attack since the November 2024 ceasefire. The barrage followed the assassination of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei in a joint US-Israeli operation on February 28. Israel responded with over 500 strikes across Lebanon, including 26 waves of airstrikes on Beirut’s southern suburbs. Human Rights Watch previously documented widespread Israeli use of white phosphorus in southern Lebanon between October 2023 and May 2024. As of March 8, at least 394 people had been killed and more than 1,000 injured across Lebanon, with over 300,000 displaced.

The Angle

The legal architecture around white phosphorus is worth understanding precisely, because it reveals something about how the rules of war actually function. White phosphorus is not banned. It is not classified as an incendiary weapon under Protocol III because it is categorised as a smoke-screening agent with incidental incendiary effects — a distinction that has allowed every military that uses it, including the United States, to deploy it within the letter of the law while producing the burns, fires, and civilian harm that the law was nominally written to prevent. The gap between what the regulation was designed to do and what it permits is not an oversight. It is the regulation working as constructed — by states that manufacture the munitions.

Human Rights Watch has documented Israeli white phosphorus use in southern Lebanon in 2006, in Gaza in 2009, in both Gaza and Lebanon in 2023, and now again in 2026. Each time, the same sequence: verified evidence, legal condemnation, a call for arms suspensions, and then continuity. The pattern is not a failure of accountability. It is what accountability looks like when the mechanism of enforcement — arms-supplying states exercising leverage — has no structural incentive to activate. The tool exists. The conditions under which it would be used do not.

What the Yohmor images document is narrower than the debate around them. Two homes on fire, felt wedges burning on residential streets, civil defence workers doing what they can. Somewhere upstream of that scene sits a classification framework that defines the weapon as something other than what it demonstrably does when it lands.