Israeli Strikes on al-Qard al-Hassan Branches Raise New War Crimes Concerns in Lebanon

Last updated: 13 October 2026

Lebanon /
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On 12 March 2026, Amnesty International published a report arguing that recent Israeli air strikes on branches of al-Qard al-Hassan, a non-profit financial institution linked to Hezbollah, should be investigated as possible war crimes. The articlesays the attacks, carried out across Beirut’s southern suburbs, south Lebanon, and the Beqaa, hit facilities that Amnesty considers civilian in nature and for which it says Israel has provided no evidence of direct military use.

According to the report, the Israeli military announced on 2 March that it would target all branches of al-Qard al-Hassan across Lebanon, and by 10 March said it had struck “around 30 branches” over the previous week. Amnesty notes that many ofthese offices are located inside residential buildings or in crowded neighborhoods, raising immediate concerns about civilian harm and damage to surrounding infrastructure.

A central argument in the article is that affiliation with Hezbollah does not, by itself, make a civilian institution a lawful military target. Amnesty says international humanitarian law protects civilian objects, including financial institutions, unlessthey make an effective contribution to military action and their destruction offers a definite military advantageat the time of attack. The organization states that it has not seen evidence from Israeli authorities showing that the struck al-Qard al-Hassan branches met those criteria.

The article therefore frames the issue as a legal one, not only a political one. It says Israeli authorities described al-Qard al-Hassan as “terrorist infrastructure” and as a source of financial support for Hezbollah, but Amnesty argues that even if thoseallegations were true, financial links alone would not strip the buildings of their protected civilian status under the laws of war. In that reading, the legality of the attacks depends not on broad claims of association, but on whether each site wasactually being used in a way that directly contributed to military operations.

The report also explains why the strikes matter to civilians beyond the immediate blast damage. It says al-Qard al-Hassan has long functioned as one of Lebanon’s main microcredit providers, operating under an NGO license since 1987. Althoughit does not hold a license from Lebanon’s central bank to act as a formal financial institution, it has been widely used by ordinary people seeking loans and basic financial services, especially after Lebanon’s banking collapse. Amnesty says thedestruction of its offices has disrupted access to loans and other services used by tens of thousands of civiliansto pay for school fees, healthcare, and transportation to work.

That social role is one of the article’s most important themes. Amnesty interviewed 12 people from diverse backgrounds who had used the institution’s services and says it found that al-Qard al-Hassan served not only Shia communities but alsopeople from other religious and social backgrounds. The report includes examples of borrowers using small loans to cover children’s education, to replace essential work equipment, or to secure emergency funds after the collapse of the formalbanking sector. It also notes that some people preferred the association because it offered interest-free loans, which is important for some Muslim borrowers.

In this sense, the article presents the strikes as damaging not only a building network, but also a wider layer of civilian survival infrastructure in a country already under severe economic and military stress. One woman cited by Amnesty said she hadused al-Qard al-Hassan for over 27 years to pay education costs for her children. Another person said a loan obtained by pawning a necklace helped her buy a motor for her sewing machine, which was the household’s only source of income. Others told Amnesty they had turned to the institution after Lebanese banks limited or blocked access to savings during the country’s financial collapse.

The article also reconstructs how the strikes were carried out. It says there were two major rounds of attacks, on 2 March and 9 March. On 2 March, at approximately 1:55 p.m., an Israeli military spokesperson announced attacks on al-Qard al-Hassan infrastructure and ordered residents within a 300-meter radius of 18 identified locations to evacuate immediately. Between 1:55 and 2:30 p.m., the spokesperson issued a series of maps and warnings for multiple sites across Lebanon. A few minutes before 4 p.m., Israeli forces began striking those locations, and at 7:38 p.m. the operation was declared complete.

Amnesty says it verified footage from four locations targeted on 2 and 9 March. In one case, the organization verified video showing an air-dropped munition hitting a three-storey building in a residential and commercial district of Tyre/Sour on 2 March. Aftermath footage showed that the destroyed structure stood opposite a shopping mall and that nearby businesses, including a department store, restaurants, and a pharmacy, suffered extensive damage. Less than 2 kilometers away, another 11-storey building hosting an al-Qard al-Hassan branch was also destroyed, with nearby apartment blocks damaged and an elementary school located across the street.

The second round of attacks, according to the article, was more ambiguous in its warning process. After issuing mass evacuation orders on 5 March for four major districts in Beirut’s southern suburbs and repeating them several times, Israeliforces continued to strike those areas day and night without giving location-specific warnings each time. Then, on 9 March at 8:49 a.m., an Israeli military spokesperson announced further strikes on al-Qard al-Hassan branches in Beirut’s southernsuburbs but, unlike the 2 March warnings, did not identify individual locations or provide a map. Around 10:50 a.m., Israeli forces launched another wave of attacks targeting more than a dozen buildings, including structures that housed al-Qard al-Hassan branches.

A major concern in the article is therefore not only what was hit, but how the strikes were conducted in densely populated urban settings. The report says many of the branches were embedded in civilian neighborhoods and residential blocks. Evenwhere warnings were issued, Amnesty argues that attacks on civilian objects remain unlawful if the sites do not qualify as military objectives. The article further suggests that general or mass warnings cannot by themselves legalize strikes oncivilian infrastructure used by non-combatants.

The article also places these strikes in the wider military escalation that began after 2 March 2026, when Hezbollah launched attacks into Israel in response to the killing of Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei following a US-Israeli attack onIran. Israel then announced strikes on Hezbollah targets across Lebanon as part of Operation “Roar of the Lion.” In the days that followed, Israel carried out hundreds of strikes across Lebanon and issued multiple large-scale evacuation orders. Hezbollah, the article says, continued to fire rockets into Israel on a daily basis. Amnesty also notes that by 11 March, Lebanon’s Disaster Management Unit reported 634 people killed and 816,700 displaced in Lebanon, while at least 12 civiliancasualties had been reported in Israel since 28 February as a result of attacks from Iran.

The report further notes that this is the third round of Israeli military attacks on al-Qard al-Hassan. During the 2024 escalation, the Israeli military said it had targeted “close to 30” of the institution’s sites across Beirut, south Lebanon, and theBeqaa on 21 October 2024. Amnesty says that at the time it also called for those strikes to be investigated as war crimes. After a ceasefire in December 2024, the association announced the reopening of 16 branches, but the latest round of attacksagain left many structures destroyed or non-operational.

Taken together, the article presents the al-Qard al-Hassan strikes as part of a broader pattern in which the Israeli military has, in Amnesty’s view, repeatedly treated institutions linked to Hezbollah as automatically targetable, regardless of whetherthose sites were actually making a direct military contribution at the moment of attack. The organization argues that this approach is incompatible with one of the core rules of war: the distinction between military objectives and civilian objects.

Conclusion

The Amnesty report presents the strikes on al-Qard al-Hassan as a significant test of how international humanitarian law is applied in an increasingly destructive regional conflict. Its central claim is that broad allegations of Hezbollah affiliation arenot enough to lawfully justify attacks on financial institutions embedded in civilian neighborhoods.

More broadly, the case is drawing attention because it combines several urgent issues at once: the protection of civilian infrastructure, the economic survival of ordinary Lebanese families, the adequacy of evacuation warnings, and the question ofwhether repeated attacks on supposedly civilian sites will face meaningful scrutiny. In that context, the report portrays the destruction of these branches as part of a wider pattern of harm to civilians already living through mass displacement andescalating war.