On 18 April 1996, during an Israeli assault on southern Lebanon intended to eradicate Hezbollah, Israeli forces deliberately shelled a United Nations compound in the Lebanese village of Qana, where more than eight hundred civilians were sheltering.1 Although UN staffers notified the Israelis during the first minutes of bombing that they were shelling refugees, and although Israeli reconnaissance helicopters had been patrolling the area for two days and were aware of the refugee presence, the bombing continued until, at the end of the onslaught, more than a hundred civilians were dead and hundreds more, including UN personnel, were wounded. In November 2005, nearly a decade after the attack, the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York brought a class action suit on behalf of Lebanese survivors against Lieutenant General (ret.) Moshe Ya’alon, the head of the Israeli Defense Force’s intelligence branch at the time of the attack. The suit, which was filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, alleged, among other things, that Ya’alon “authorized, directed, planned, commanded . . . and failed to prevent” the attack on the refugees at Qana. The charges against Ya’alon included war crimes; extra-