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January 21st,
2009 - Outcry Erupts Over Reports That Israel Used Phosphorus on Gazans News article from New York Times |
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Outcry Erupts Over Reports
That Israel Used Phosphorus Arms on Gazans By Ethan Bronner New York Times January 21, 2009 Gaza - In early January, a
week into Israel’s war in Gaza, the home of Sabah Abu Halima was hit by an
Israeli shell. Ms. Abu Halima, the matriarch of a farming family in the
northern Gaza area of Beit Lahiya, was caught in an inferno that burned her
husband and four of their nine children to death. But as she lay in a bed on
the third floor of an annex to Shifa Hospital in Gaza City on Wednesday,
bandaged all over and in terrible pain, it was less the magnitude of her loss
than the source of the fire that was drawing attention, not only from her
doctors but also from human rights organizations and even the Israeli
military. Though there has been no
independent confirmation, Palestinian officials say her family was hit by
white phosphorus, a weapon that militaries use widely to obscure the
battlefield but that is also limited under an international convention that
bans targeting civilians with it. The Israeli military issued
a short statement on Wednesday, saying it was investigating whether its use
of phosphorous weapons was improper and reiterating that it was “obligated to
international law” in the matter. Early in the war, Israeli officials would
not confirm whether the military was using white phosphorus at all, but said
only that it was using weapons in legal ways. Meanwhile, Amnesty
International said it found “indisputable evidence of widespread use of white
phosphorus in densely populated residential areas in Gaza City and in the
north.” In a statement, it said its investigators “saw streets and alleyways
littered with evidence of the use of white phosphorus, including
still-burning wedges and the remnants of the shells and canisters fired by
the Israeli Army.” It called such use a likely war crime and demanded a full
international investigation. The use of white phosphorus
and other incendiary weapons is covered in one protocol of a 1980
international treaty, the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons, that
bans making civilians “the object of attack” by such arms. More broadly,
though, international officials have acknowledged that militaries can
legitimately use the substance in some cases. Phosphorus rounds are
usually used to spread a thick, white smoke to screen military actions and
mark specific areas. Military experts say phosphorus is often particularly
useful in urban warfare, in part because it creates tall columns of smoke
that can obscure upper-story windows. But human rights groups
harshly criticize its use, saying that the horrible burns and the widespread
fires that phosphorus causes make it a menace to civilians. Peter Herby, the
head of the Arms Unit for the International Committee of the Red Cross, said
in a statement that his agency would not comment publicly on whether it
considered Israel’s use of white phosphorus a violation of international
humanitarian standards, pending further investigation. In Gaza, Ms. Abu Halima said
that when her family was hit, “fire came from the bodies of my husband and my
children.” “The children were
screaming, ‘Fire! Fire!’ and there was smoke everywhere and a horrible,
suffocating smell,” she said. “My 14-year-old cried out, ‘I’m going to die. I
want to pray.’ I saw my daughter-in-law melt away.” Dr. Nafez Abu Shaban, head
of Shifa’s burn unit, said the family’s burns, which he and an assisting
doctor from Egypt had treated, were of a kind he had never encountered,
reaching to the muscle and bone. “They were deeper and wider
than anything I had seen; a bad odor came from the wounds and smoke continued
to come out of them for many hours,” he said in his office around the corner
from Ms. Abu Halima’s sickbed. He added, “We took out a
piece of foreign matter that a colleague identified as white phosphorous.” Dr. Shaban said that dozens
of such cases came to Shifa during the war and that his unit was unprepared
to handle them. Many of the burn patients have been sent to Egypt and abroad
from there. In a few cases, he said, seemingly limited burns led to the
patients’ deaths. The doctors discovered that
the best way to deal with such burns was to get the patients immediately into
surgery and clean the areas well. Initial attempts to dress phosphorous burns
like normal ones made them worse. Part of what makes white
phosphorus controversial is that it can be difficult to control how wide the
effects are. When the shells explode in the air, they disperse pieces of felt
soaked in phosphorus - larger version of the shells contain more than 100 of
them - that can land on people and cause intense burning, according to Chris
Cobb-Smith, a British Army veteran who is here as part of Amnesty
International’s investigative team. The newspaper Haaretz reported
Wednesday that one focus of the Israeli military’s inquiry was the use of
white phosphorus by a reserve brigade that fired about 20 such shells in Beit
Lahiya, where Ms. Abu Halima lives. Col. Shai Alkalai, an artillery officer,
is leading the investigation. Haaretz said about 200 such
shells were fired in the fighting, nearly all at orchards where Hamas gunmen
and rocket-launching crews were taking cover. The article added that some
of the rounds used were recently acquired 120-millimeter phosphorus shells
that have a computerized targeting system attached to a G.P.S. unit. It
quoted commanders as saying the shells had been effective but were apparently
also responsible for the strike on a United Nations school that killed two
and a friendly-fire episode that seriously wounded two Israeli officers. Donatella Rovera, Amnesty
International’s researcher for Israel, the West Bank and Gaza, said in an
interview, “We don’t know why they used them, but we do know that it could
constitute a war crime.” She added, “It is not a
banned weapon, but it matters how you use it and there is no reason to use it
in such densely populated areas. We want a full impartial investigation, not
one by the army that used it.” Ms. Abu Halima said that on
Tuesday some relatives went to her home and found it destroyed. They then
properly buried the dead. She wept with fury, saying
that as farmers she and her family had good relations with Israelis, selling
them produce in past years. But now, she said, she wants to see Israel’s
leaders - she named the foreign minister and president - “burn like my
children burned.” “They should feel the pain
we felt.” External link: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/22/world/middleeast/22phosphorus.html Did the Israelis use white
phosphorus in populated areas? By Shashank Bengali McClatchy Newspapers January 21, 2009 Gaza City, Gaza Strip - The
Israeli military is investigating whether its soldiers fighting in the
densely populated Gaza Strip improperly fired shells packed with white
phosphorus, a powerful chemical munition that can cause serious and sometimes
fatal burns, officials said Wednesday. It's the first time that
Israel has acknowledged using the controversial weapon during the 22-day war
in Gaza, although doctors, United Nations officials and independent
human-rights groups have accused Israeli forces of firing phosphorus in
civilian areas, a possible violation of U.N. conventions on warfare. White phosphorus is legal
under international law if it's used as a smoke screen to obscure troop
movements or other military operations, but it's highly dangerous if it's
deployed in heavily populated areas, because it can set skin on fire and burn
all the way to the bone. Israel has said repeatedly that it used weapons
consistent with international laws during its war against the militant
Islamic group Hamas. However, doctors interviewed
Wednesday in Gaza said that so many patients had sustained burns consistent
with white phosphorus that it appeared that Israeli forces used the chemical
in highly populated areas. At Shifa, the main hospital
in Gaza City, doctors said that scores of patients had arrived with unusual
burns, dark, foul-smelling splotches that grew deeper and blacker despite
being washed with water and saline solution. The burns were so toxic in some
patients that even those with relatively minor wounds, which ought to have
been treatable, grew ill and died, the doctors said. "We have never seen
this type of injury or the number of such injuries," said Dr. Nafez Abu
Shaaban, the head of the burns unit at Shifa. "These were not usual
burns." Patients told medics that
they'd come into contact with smoking, spongelike wafers of phosphorus, and
in some cases, doctors said, victims reached hospitals with wounds still
smoking. White phosphorus burns as long as it's exposed to oxygen, and it can
reach temperatures well over 1,000 degrees. The injuries baffled Gaza's
medical staff, adding to the enormous strain that the war placed on a
bare-bones health system. Gaza health officials say that more than 1,300
Palestinians were killed in the fighting, two-fifths of them children and
women. Thirteen Israelis died, 10 of them soldiers. "Patients were asking
me, 'What's the complication?'" said the British-trained Abu Shaaban,
one of the most senior burn surgeons in Gaza. "I didn't have the
answer." In a Spartan room in the
reconstructive-surgery wing of Shifa, 41-year-old Sabha Abu Halimah, her left
hand still covered with thick black lesions, described how a shell had struck
a house Jan. 4 - shortly after Israel launched its ground invasion of Gaza -
in which 16 members of her family had taken shelter in the northern town of
Beit Lahiya. Her 10-year-old son, Zayed,
screamed, "Mom, Mom, fire!" He perished in the flames, along with
her husband and three other children, including a 15-month-old girl. Her
clothes ablaze, Sabha Abu Halimah rolled on the ground for several minutes until
most of the flames were extinguished, but when relatives brought her to the
hospital several hours later, her burns were still smoking, doctors said. Capt. Elie Isaacson, an
Israeli military spokesman, said that an investigative team would probe the
force's use of phosphorus "due to the number of claims that have come in
from the press and from other sources." Amnesty International, an
independent human-rights advocacy group, said that its researchers had found
phosphorus wedges, sometimes still smoking, in residential areas of Gaza. The
group said that the wedges had been packed into steel artillery shells and
fired from the air, a tactic that - depending on the height from which
they're fired and the wind conditions - can scatter them over an area larger
than a football field. U.N. officials said they
suspected that phosphorus-loaded shells caused a fire at the main U.N.
warehouse in Gaza last week. Reporters who visited the warehouse Wednesday
said that food that had been destroyed in the fire - intended for humanitarian
relief - was still smoldering. Donatella Rovera, an Amnesty
International researcher, charged that Israel had used the weapon in "a
completely unlawful manner, in places it should never be used under any
circumstances." The doctors also accused
Israel of using another controversial weapon, known as dense inert metal
explosives. These are compact munitions packed with bits of tungsten that
explode on contact, spraying the tungsten like molten metal vapor over a
small area. Some researchers have found that vaporized tungsten can cause
cancer in mice. Experts say that DIMEs are
designed to minimize collateral damage, but they cause horrific damage at the
impact point. Erik Fosse, a Norwegian doctor who has more than two decades of
experience in war zones, said he saw several patients at Shifa who had
virtually no injuries to their upper bodies but had lost most of their lower
bodies - often requiring both legs to be amputated - suggesting that DIMEs
had struck them. Isaacson, the military
spokesman, said that he'd look into the charges but repeated the assertion
that Israeli weapons were used in accordance with international laws. External link: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/world/story/60422.html |