New Delhi, July 28 -- BEIRUT - The school was housing roughly a thousand displaced people when Volker Turk visited it on Sunday. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights had come to Lebanon to see what the country looked like more than three months after an April ceasefire was supposed to have halted Israeli military operations in the south. What he found, he told reporters in Beirut, was "widespread damage and compounded suffering" and a population carrying trauma that had accumulated through multiple cycles of displacement.

Turk's office documented violations that his investigators concluded "possibly amount to war crimes." The operations in question continued after the ceasefire went into effect in April - air strikes, ground movemen...