A war crime is a violation of the laws of war that gives rise to individual criminal responsibility for actions by combatants in action, such as intentionally killing civilians or intentionally killing prisoners of war, torture, taking hostages, unnecessarily destroying civilian property, deception by perfidy, wartime sexual violence, pillaging, and for any individual that is part of the command structure who orders any attempt to committing mass killings including genocide or ethnic cleansing, the granting of no quarter despite surrender, the conscription of children in the military and flouting the legal distinctions of proportionality and military necessity.
A U.S. soldier observing victims of the Malmedy massacre (17 December 1944), where 84 U.S. prisoners of war were murdered by the Waffen-SS in Belgium
A ditch full of the bodies of Chinese civilians killed by Japanese soldiers in Suzhou, China, 1938
HRW wrote that the Saudi Arabian-led military intervention in Yemen that began on March 26, 2015, involved airstrikes in apparent violation of the laws of war.
Bodies of some of the hundreds of Vietnamese villagers who were killed by U.S. soldiers during the My Lai Massacre
Ethnic cleansing is the systematic forced removal of ethnic, racial, or religious groups from a given area, with the intent of making the society ethnically homogeneous. Along with direct removal such as deportation or population transfer, it also includes indirect methods aimed at forced migration by coercing the victim group to flee and preventing its return, such as murder, rape, and property destruction. Both the definition and charge of ethnic cleansing is often disputed, with some researchers including and others excluding coercive assimilation or mass killings as a means of depopulating an area of a particular group.
A group of Bosniaks from the Lašva Valley close by Travnik, Bosnia and Herzegovina that were kicked out of their homes and villages by Croat forces in 1993
Russian Count Nikolay Yevdokimov, who organized the extermination campaigns of "Tsitsekun", designated Russian military operations targeting Circassian natives by the term “ochishchenie” (cleansing).
Refugees at Taurus Pass during the Armenian genocide. The Young Turk triumvirate aimed to reduce the number of Armenians to below 5–10% of the population in any part of the Ottoman empire, which resulted in the elimination of a million Armenians.
Expulsion of Germans from Czechoslovakia following the end of World War II