Originally from Arbitrating Armed Conflict: Decisions of the Israel - Lebanon Monitoring Group

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A. Converging on a Legal Arrangement to Avoid War
The parties to the conflict in south Lebanon made a significant effort over a period of four years to uphold the April Agreement and to protect the lives of civilians.  While application of the Agreement was by no means perfect and civilians on both sides of the border continued to suffer, the military forces did make an effort to abide by the Agreement and civilian suffering was reduced.  Moreover, throughout the period during which the military forces in south Lebanon honored the text of the April Agreement, military forces in many other conflicts around the world made little if any effort to protect civilians.   
The war in southern Lebanon was not a likely candidate to be the one international military conflict in the world in which the parties agreed to restrict their actions in accordance with a code of conduct that protects civilian targets.  A regular standing army employing weapons of mass firepower in order to hunt and eliminate irregular forces operating in a populated field of action is not likely to agree to restrict its forces to strictly military targets.  Furthermore, such voluntary restraint is even less likely when the field of action is a natural terrain that favors guerrilla warfare, as it is in south Lebanon.1  And as far as Hesbollah is concerned, an irregular military force with the capacity to wreak havoc on a soft metropolitan target by lobbing missiles at it is unlikely to agree not to use such tactics.