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October 30, 2006

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A Soul Searching Mission (Guardian) A probing analysis of recent sex scandals in Israel, on the links between sexism, militarism, racism and violence

Mystery of Israel's Secret Uranium Bomb (Robert Fisk) on the as-yet-uncomfirmed possibility that Israel used uranium weapons in Lebanon

Israel Admits Using Phosphorus Bombs During War in Lebanon (Ha'aretz) on the newly confirmed use of the chemical weapon in Lebanon

More Important Articles Links to other important news articles for today

[JPN Commentary: In this probing piece on the underlying, structural causes behind recent sexual scandals in Israel, Arthur Neslen takes readers far beyond "the usual suspects". He points out the largely overlooked links between militarized society and sexualized violence, offering varied evidence for the process of internal brutalization that is taking place within the Israeli "safe haven for Jews". Neslen's selection of data offers sound support for a view of gendered violence as systemic, rather than coincidental, in Israel's culture of soldiers, also demonstrating that it is apparently on the rise. Recognizing this reality could seriously threaten perceptions of the military as the hallowed protector of "women-and-children". Consequently, according to Neslen, the public discourse around recent sexual scandals consistently avoids these "elephants in the hallway".

Listing the first of these "elephants" as "[rising] domestic violence" and "sexual violence in the military" Neslen goes on to list a third unspoken, unrecognized social phenomenon: "sexual violence against Arabs", which he admits is "one of the most difficult areas to investigate". While not a statistical sample, my own personal experience, working with Israeli and Palestinian Physicians for Human Rights in 1992-4, included handling a case of the rape in custody—by a military prison guard—of a teenage Palestinian detainee.

Finally, Neslen links these sexist and racist forms of sexualized brutalization with additional manifestations of deep-running racism in Israeli society. He touches on the embedded discrimination against Jews of color, "Mizrachim (or 'Orientals')", severely exacerbated over recent years by the implementation of "an accelerated neo-liberal economic programme that has removed … safety nets for Israel's poor". It might be added that the same process has benefitted Israel's rich enormously, making the dividing gaps wider than ever before and among some of the widest in the western world. As annual defense budgets continue to grow in Israel, the defense sector is among the direct beneficiaries of this process.

Neslen's article offers important insights into the extremely destructive forces that are currently tearing apart the fabric of Israeli Jewish society. RM]

October 19, 2006 10:01 AM

http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/arthur_neslen/2006/10/arthur_neslen_1.html

As court officials began drafting the indictment of Israel's president Moshe Katsav on charges of rape, sexual harassment and misconduct, Israelis seemed preoccupied with the reputation of the country and the image of its highest office. Writing in the Ha'aretz newspaper, Ze'ev Segal called on Katsav to resign "to save his presidency's honour, his own health and the public's faith in the institution of the presidency".

On one level, it was gratifying to see the country talking about sexual violence against women, however indirectly. The issue has long been confined to women's groups and the inside pages of Ha'aretz. But if Israel was sitting down to search its soul, it seemed to be deliberately missing the gory bits. For the Katsav allegations are only the latest in a string of violent sex scandals over the summer.

The recently resigned justice minister and Kadima MK, Haim Ramon, also went on trial this week accused of sexual harassing a female soldier on 12 July, the day that Hizbullah seized two Israeli soldiers and the recent war began.

On 29 September, Colonel Atef Zahar was sentenced to six years in prison for raping a female soldier who had served under his command. Earlier that same month, the officer of the military advocate general announced that no suspects would face criminal charges for the alleged gang rape of a 12-year-old girl living on the Israel Air Force's Nevatim base.

Instead, a military tribunal will now try 30 soldiers who allegedly had sex with the girl on charges of conduct unbecoming. When first informed of the case by the social welfare ministry - two and a half years before the case came to court - the army had said that it was "not its concern". The girl has since been hospitalised for psychiatric treatment.

Feminist groups in Israel, such as New Profile, have warned for years that the militarisation of Israeli society was disfiguring its home front. They said that the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza was spilling back across the Green Line onto a home front ill-prepared to cope with it. Now that its effects appear to be lapping at the door of even the president's residence, the effort to clean up the mess seems to be organised around several large elephants in the hallway.

Elephant number one: domestic violence. Between 2000 and 2005, there was an almost 300% increase in the number of Israeli women murdered by firearms, almost half of whom were killed by partners who were soldiers, security guards or policemen.

Conflicts that pit young soldiers against guerrillas operating in civilian populations from which they are indistinguishable, often cause forms of traumatic illness, and so do suicide bombings. Both probably contributed to the results of a survey in 2002 which indicated that nearly one in 10 Israelis were suffering from some degree of PTSD. It may be PTSD of a wholly different order than that experienced by Palestinians, but it is a social problem nonetheless.

Elephant number two: sexual violence in the military. Katsav may not have been a soldier but Israel as a society has only lived one year without a state of national emergency - and that was 1966. The army is still revered as an exemplar of the nation at its finest, the draft is still seen as a great leveller, and military leaders go on to become political leaders. As a result, the army sets standards that percolate downwards.

This is worrying because in 2003, research from the Israel Defence Force showed that one-fifth of female soldiers had experienced sexual harassment within the army. The figures rose to 81% and 69% respectively when specific examples of harassment, such as humiliating innuendo or unwanted sexual proposals, were included.

In 2004, Hilla Kernel-Soliman, the then director of the Association of Rape Crisis Centres in Jerusalem told me there was "an atmosphere to humiliate women in the army". She said her organisation was "constantly" receiving calls about sexual harassment.

Elephant number three: sexual violence against Arabs. This is one of the most difficult areas to investigate due to the stigma attached to such crimes in Palestinian and other communities. In December 2004, the allegation by the Lebanese guerrilla leader Mustafa Dirani that he had been raped while in Israeli custody at least prized open the lid on the issue.

But stories abound from former Israeli soldiers and Palestinian NGOs of incidents that were never properly investigated, or were covered up, or sometimes were never investigated at all. Kernel-Soliman also related several incidents of alleged sexual harassment by Israeli soldiers of Palestinian women at checkpoints.

Allegations, of course, should never be taken as evidence of guilt. Figures showing rises in sexual harassment can illustrate an increased awareness of the issue among women, a greater confidence to complain about infractions, even an increased confidence in the legal system's ability to dispense justice.

But there does seem to be more than one survey that links rising sexual violence and the Intifada years. Between 1999 and 2005, for example, the Association of Rape Crisis Centres in Israel reported an increase in the number of calls to their rape crisis hotline of more than 100% - from 16,682 to 33,424 - and that is considered just the tip of the iceberg.

A dominatrix sex worker I interviewed for my book, Occupied Minds: A journey through the Israeli psyche, said that Israeli soldiers returning from the occupied territories frequently wanted to be tied up, yelled at, slapped in the face and have guns or sharp objects pointed at them. By contrast, the most common request that Israeli Arabs made of Jewish sex workers was that they dress up in IDF uniforms before sex.

For all the gravity of the charges against him, Katsav is a symbol of a wider malaise in Israeli society. To some, his reported allegation that he was the victim of a plot by dark political forces seemed typical of a persecutory mindset. Yet despite his Likudnik background, it has to be pointed out that behind the scenes, Katsav has also been an advocate of talks with Hamas and Hizbullah to free the captured Israeli soldiers in Gaza and Lebanon and secure co-existence for Israel in, as he sees it, an Islamic Middle East.

Guilty or innocent, his indictment will not cure the military brutalisation that Israeli society has undergone in the last six years. Nor will it heal the social wounds exacerbated by an accelerated neo-liberal economic programme that has removed many of the few remaining safety nets for Israel's poor. Indeed, his arraignment offers the possibility of a fake national purging that leaves Israel's self-image and reputation abroad as a liberal democracy enhanced.

And this brings us to perhaps the largest of the elephants skulking around the Israeli living room, and the place where we came in - Israeli identity. The founders of Zionism saw the country as an outpost of secular European modernity. In 1896, Theodore Herzl famously envisioned the country as "a vanguard of culture against barbarianism". Just over a century later, Ehud Barak trumpeted Israel as "a villa in the jungle".

Only last weekend, the country's ambassador to Australia, Naftali Tamir, talked of the two countries being "sisters in Asia" because, "we don't have yellow skin and slanted eyes. Asia is basically the yellow race ... we are basically the white race."

In a country where 88% of upper income Israelis are Ashkenazim (or Europeans) and 60% of lower income Israelis are Mizrahim (or "Orientals"), it is worth pointing out that Moshe Katsav, an Iranian Jew, is not part of the white race either.

Israel's soul searching about sexual violence should start with his indictment. But if it ends there, it will have found little more than a scapegoat.

[JPN Commentary: In 1998, relying on data obtained by researchers and activists under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act, I personally had occasion to inform two members of Israel's Knesset of the possible use by Israeli forces of Depleted Uranium shells, while explaining the potential, indiscriminate damage caused by such munitions to living beings, including the forces using them, and to the environment. Each of the MK's, Naomi Chazan of Meretz and Tamar Godjansky of Chadash, subsequently submitted queries to the then Minister of Defense, Itzhak Mordechai (whose conviction, since, of sexual assault has interrupted his instant post-military career in Israeli politics). The answers received at the time by both Knesset Members were almost identical to the one received by the Independent last week out of Israel's Foreign Ministry. "Israel does not use any weaponry which is not authorised by international law…" etc. Three years later, however, in 2001, information leaked by Israeli Navy officers to Yediot Aharonot newspaper, caused the Navy to issue a statement to the effect that it had discontinued the use of DU munitions. So much for the reliability of official Israeli answers on such topics, even when the questions come from Israel's elected representatives.

The following piece by Robert Fisk closely examines the possibility (still unconfirmed as yet) that Israel used some other type of uranium-based munitions in its attack on Lebanon last summer. Meanwhile recent reports from the Gaza Strip have suggested that the Israeli army is experimenting there with another type of new weapon, limiting the scope of hits while effectively slicing off "targets'" limbs. (An article from Ha'aretz was republished in the October 14th JPN. Read it here .)

Israel's systematic deployment of military force within the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has long provided the arms industries of the U.S., Britain and Israel itself, among others, with a testing ground for new "sophisticated" weaponry. This is only consistent with Israel's key role in handing over billions in U.S. taxpayers' money to the U.S. arms industry, through the 75% of U.S. military aid to Israel that are earmarked for purchases in the U.S. Testing uranium-based munitions in the south of Lebanon last summer just two miles from the Galilee, if Israel indeed did this, is equally consistent with Israeli governments' total disregard for the Israeli people they purport to defend, demonstrated in repeated decisions to expose this people to the violence of avoidable conflict and war. RM]

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/article1935945.ece

Published: 28 October 2006

Did Israel use a secret new uranium-based weapon in southern Lebanon this summer in the 34-day assault that cost more than 1,300 Lebanese lives, most of them civilians?

We know that the Israelis used American "bunker-buster" bombs on Hizbollah's Beirut headquarters. We know that they drenched southern Lebanon with cluster bombs in the last 72 hours of the war, leaving tens of thousands of bomblets which are still killing Lebanese civilians every week. And we now know - after it first categorically denied using such munitions - that the Israeli army also used phosphorous bombs, weapons which are supposed to be restricted under the third protocol of the Geneva Conventions, which neither Israel nor the United States have signed.

But scientific evidence gathered from at least two bomb craters in Khiam and At-Tiri, the scene of fierce fighting between Hizbollah guerrillas and Israeli troops last July and August, suggests that uranium-based munitions may now also be included in Israel's weapons inventory - and were used against targets in Lebanon. According to Dr Chris Busby, the British Scientific Secretary of the European Committee on Radiation Risk, two soil samples thrown up by Israeli heavy or guided bombs showed "elevated radiation signatures". Both have been forwarded for further examination to the Harwell laboratory in Oxfordshire for mass spectrometry - used by the Ministry of Defence - which has confirmed the concentration of uranium isotopes in the samples.

Dr Busby's initial report states that there are two possible reasons for the contamination. "The first is that the weapon was some novel small experimental nuclear fission device or other experimental weapon (eg, a thermobaric weapon) based on the high temperature of a uranium oxidation flash ... The second is that the weapon was a bunker-busting conventional uranium penetrator weapon employing enriched uranium rather than depleted uranium." A photograph of the explosion of the first bomb shows large clouds of black smoke that might result from burning uranium.

Enriched uranium is produced from natural uranium ore and is used as fuel for nuclear reactors. A waste productof the enrichment process is depleted uranium, it is an extremely hard metal used in anti-tank missiles for penetrating armour. Depleted uranium is less radioactive than natural uranium, which is less radioactive than enriched uranium.

Israel has a poor reputation for telling the truth about its use of weapons in Lebanon. In 1982, it denied using phosphorous munitions on civilian areas - until journalists discovered dying and dead civilians whose wounds caught fire when exposed to air.

I saw two dead babies who, when taken from a mortuary drawer in West Beirut during the Israeli siege of the city, suddenly burst back into flames. Israel officially denied using phosphorous again in Lebanon during the summer - except for "marking" targets - even after civilians were photographed in Lebanese hospitals with burn wounds consistent with phosphorous munitions.

Then on Sunday, Israel suddenly admitted that it had not been telling the truth. Jacob Edery, the Israeli minister in charge of government-parliament relations, confirmed that phosphorous shells were used in direct attacks against Hizbollah, adding that "according to international law, the use of phosphorous munitions is authorised and the (Israeli) army keeps to the rules of international norms".

Asked by The Independent if the Israeli army had been using uranium-based munitions in Lebanon this summer, Mark Regev, the Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman, said: "Israel does not use any weaponry which is not authorised by international law or international conventions." This, however, begs more questions than it answers. Much international law does not cover modern uranium weapons because they were not invented when humanitarian rules such as the Geneva Conventions were drawn up and because Western governments still refuse to believe that their use can cause long-term damage to the health of thousands of civilians living in the area of the explosions.

American and British forces used hundreds of tons of depleted uranium (DU) shells in Iraq in 1991 - their hardened penetrator warheads manufactured from the waste products of the nuclear industry - and five years later, a plague of cancers emerged across the south of Iraq.

Initial US military assessments warned of grave consequences for public health if such weapons were used against armoured vehicles. But the US administration and the British government later went out of their way to belittle these claims. Yet the cancers continued to spread amid reports that civilians in Bosnia - where DU was also used by Nato aircraft - were suffering new forms of cancer. DU shells were again used in the 2003 Anglo-American invasion of Iraq but it is too early to register any health effects.

"When a uranium penetrator hits a hard target, the particles of the explosion are very long-lived in the environment," Dr Busby said yesterday. "They spread over long distances. They can be inhaled into the lungs. The military really seem to believe that this stuff is not as dangerous as it is." Yet why would Israel use such a weapon when its targets - in the case of Khiam, for example - were only two miles from the Israeli border? The dust ignited by DU munitions can be blown across international borders, just as the chlorine gas used in attacks by both sides in the First World War often blew back on its perpetrators.

Chris Bellamy, the professor of military science and doctrine at Cranfield University, who has reviewed the Busby report, said: "At worst it's some sort of experimental weapon with an enriched uranium component the purpose of which we don't yet know. At best - if you can say that - it shows a remarkably cavalier attitude to the use of nuclear waste products."

The soil sample from Khiam - site of a notorious torture prison when Israel occupied southern Lebanon between 1978 and 2000, and a frontline Hizbollah stronghold in the summer war - was a piece of impacted red earth from an explosion; the isotope ratio was 108, indicative of the presence of enriched uranium. "The health effects on local civilian populations following the use of large uranium penetrators and the large amounts of respirable uranium oxide particles in the atmosphere," the Busby report says, "are likely to be significant ... we recommend that the area is examined for further traces of these weapons with a view to clean up."

This summer's Lebanon war began after Hizbollah guerrillas crossed the Lebanese frontier into Israel, captured two Israeli soldiers and killed three others, prompting Israel to unleash a massive bombardment of Lebanon's villages, cities, bridges and civilian infrastructure. Human rights groups have said that Israel committed war crimes when it attacked civilians, but that Hizbollah was also guilty of such crimes because it fired missiles into Israel which were also filled with ball-bearings, turning their rockets into primitive one-time-only cluster bombs.

Many Lebanese, however, long ago concluded that the latest Lebanon war was a weapons testing ground for the Americans and Iranians, who respectively supply Israel and Hizbollah with munitions. Just as Israel used hitherto-unproven US missiles in its attacks, so the Iranians were able to test-fire a rocket which hit an Israeli corvette off the Lebanese coast, killing four Israeli sailors and almost sinking the vessel after it suffered a 15-hour on-board fire.

What the weapons manufacturers make of the latest scientific findings of potential uranium weapons use in southern Lebanon is not yet known. Nor is their effect on civilians.

Did Israel use a secret new uranium-based weapon in southern Lebanon this summer in the 34-day assault that cost more than 1,300 Lebanese lives, most of them civilians?

We know that the Israelis used American "bunker-buster" bombs on Hizbollah's Beirut headquarters. We know that they drenched southern Lebanon with cluster bombs in the last 72 hours of the war, leaving tens of thousands of bomblets which are still killing Lebanese civilians every week. And we now know - after it first categorically denied using such munitions - that the Israeli army also used phosphorous bombs, weapons which are supposed to be restricted under the third protocol of the Geneva Conventions, which neither Israel nor the United States have signed.

But scientific evidence gathered from at least two bomb craters in Khiam and At-Tiri, the scene of fierce fighting between Hizbollah guerrillas and Israeli troops last July and August, suggests that uranium-based munitions may now also be included in Israel's weapons inventory - and were used against targets in Lebanon. According to Dr Chris Busby, the British Scientific Secretary of the European Committee on Radiation Risk, two soil samples thrown up by Israeli heavy or guided bombs showed "elevated radiation signatures". Both have been forwarded for further examination to the Harwell laboratory in Oxfordshire for mass spectrometry - used by the Ministry of Defence - which has confirmed the concentration of uranium isotopes in the samples.

Dr Busby's initial report states that there are two possible reasons for the contamination. "The first is that the weapon was some novel small experimental nuclear fission device or other experimental weapon (eg, a thermobaric weapon) based on the high temperature of a uranium oxidation flash ... The second is that the weapon was a bunker-busting conventional uranium penetrator weapon employing enriched uranium rather than depleted uranium." A photograph of the explosion of the first bomb shows large clouds of black smoke that might result from burning uranium.

Enriched uranium is produced from natural uranium ore and is used as fuel for nuclear reactors. A waste productof the enrichment process is depleted uranium, it is an extremely hard metal used in anti-tank missiles for penetrating armour. Depleted uranium is less radioactive than natural uranium, which is less radioactive than enriched uranium.

Israel has a poor reputation for telling the truth about its use of weapons in Lebanon. In 1982, it denied using phosphorous munitions on civilian areas - until journalists discovered dying and dead civilians whose wounds caught fire when exposed to air.

I saw two dead babies who, when taken from a mortuary drawer in West Beirut during the Israeli siege of the city, suddenly burst back into flames. Israel officially denied using phosphorous again in Lebanon during the summer - except for "marking" targets - even after civilians were photographed in Lebanese hospitals with burn wounds consistent with phosphorous munitions.

Then on Sunday, Israel suddenly admitted that it had not been telling the truth. Jacob Edery, the Israeli minister in charge of government-parliament relations, confirmed that phosphorous shells were used in direct attacks against Hizbollah, adding that "according to international law, the use of phosphorous munitions is authorised and the (Israeli) army keeps to the rules of international norms".

Asked by The Independent if the Israeli army had been using uranium-based munitions in Lebanon this summer, Mark Regev, the Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman, said: "Israel does not use any weaponry which is not authorised by international law or international conventions." This, however, begs more questions than it answers. Much international law does not cover modern uranium weapons because they were not invented when humanitarian rules such as the Geneva Conventions were drawn up and because Western governments still refuse to believe that their use can cause long-term damage to the health of thousands of civilians living in the area of the explosions.

American and British forces used hundreds of tons of depleted uranium (DU) shells in Iraq in 1991 - their hardened penetrator warheads manufactured from the waste products of the nuclear industry - and five years later, a plague of cancers emerged across the south of Iraq.

Initial US military assessments warned of grave consequences for public health if such weapons were used against armoured vehicles. But the US administration and the British government later went out of their way to belittle these claims. Yet the cancers continued to spread amid reports that civilians in Bosnia - where DU was also used by Nato aircraft - were suffering new forms of cancer. DU shells were again used in the 2003 Anglo-American invasion of Iraq but it is too early to register any health effects.

"When a uranium penetrator hits a hard target, the particles of the explosion are very long-lived in the environment," Dr Busby said yesterday. "They spread over long distances. They can be inhaled into the lungs. The military really seem to believe that this stuff is not as dangerous as it is." Yet why would Israel use such a weapon when its targets - in the case of Khiam, for example - were only two miles from the Israeli border? The dust ignited by DU munitions can be blown across international borders, just as the chlorine gas used in attacks by both sides in the First World War often blew back on its perpetrators.

Chris Bellamy, the professor of military science and doctrine at Cranfield University, who has reviewed the Busby report, said: "At worst it's some sort of experimental weapon with an enriched uranium component the purpose of which we don't yet know. At best - if you can say that - it shows a remarkably cavalier attitude to the use of nuclear waste products."

The soil sample from Khiam - site of a notorious torture prison when Israel occupied southern Lebanon between 1978 and 2000, and a frontline Hizbollah stronghold in the summer war - was a piece of impacted red earth from an explosion; the isotope ratio was 108, indicative of the presence of enriched uranium. "The health effects on local civilian populations following the use of large uranium penetrators and the large amounts of respirable uranium oxide particles in the atmosphere," the Busby report says, "are likely to be significant ... we recommend that the area is examined for further traces of these weapons with a view to clean up."

This summer's Lebanon war began after Hizbollah guerrillas crossed the Lebanese frontier into Israel, captured two Israeli soldiers and killed three others, prompting Israel to unleash a massive bombardment of Lebanon's villages, cities, bridges and civilian infrastructure. Human rights groups have said that Israel committed war crimes when it attacked civilians, but that Hizbollah was also guilty of such crimes because it fired missiles into Israel which were also filled with ball-bearings, turning their rockets into primitive one-time-only cluster bombs.

Many Lebanese, however, long ago concluded that the latest Lebanon war was a weapons testing ground for the Americans and Iranians, who respectively supply Israel and Hizbollah with munitions. Just as Israel used hitherto-unproven US missiles in its attacks, so the Iranians were able to test-fire a rocket which hit an Israeli corvette off the Lebanese coast, killing four Israeli sailors and almost sinking the vessel after it suffered a 15-hour on-board fire.

What the weapons manufacturers make of the latest scientific findings of potential uranium weapons use in southern Lebanon is not yet known. Nor is their effect on civilians.

[JPN Commentary: Israel has admitted for the first time that it used phosphorus weapons in the recent war on Lebanon. Phosphorus weapons cause extraordinary suffering through intense burning of human flesh - literally burning the skin off of victims; these weapons act on humans as a chemical weapon, leading many to claim that their use is illegal and in violation of the Geneva Conventions. Israel claims otherwise, stating that it abided by international law, using these weapons on Hezbollah “military targets” - yet any observer of this war will recall that Israel has constantly claimed that Hezbollah fighters embed themselves with civilians, thus ‘justifying’ what Human Rights Watch has called “indiscriminate attacks” against civilians (see the HRW report here ). Israel’s claim that it attacked military targets resembles the U.S.’s excuse in the 2004 onslaught against Fallujah, in which phosporus weapons were also used, injuring and killing many civilians. The use of phosphorus in Fallujah was also initially denied, though later admitted. It also shouldn’t surprise us that the U.S. used phosphorus weapons extensively in Vietnam.

Governments may claim that they are aiming for military targets, but even if they are - and Israel’s particular claim to attack only military targets in Lebanon has been refuted by Human Rights Watch and Israeli combat pilots (as published in the August 10th JPN ), among others - the weapons used do not discriminate between civilian and military. The vast majority of casualties of war are civilians, who stand little chance against these horrific, supremely brutal weapons. To watch an Italian documentary on the use of phosphorus weapons in Fallujah, go here . But be warned: the documentary is painfully graphic. SAM]

Last update - 06:42 22/10/2006

Israel has acknowledged for the first time that it attacked Hezbollah targets during the second Lebanon war with phosphorus shells. White phosphorus causes very painful and often lethal chemical burns to those hit by it, and until recently Israel maintained that it only uses such bombs to mark targets or territory.

The announcement that the Israel Defense Forces had used phosphorus bombs in the war in Lebanon was made by Minister Jacob Edery, in charge of government-Knesset relations. He had been queried on the matter by MK Zahava Gal-On (Meretz-Yahad).

"The IDF holds phosphorus munitions in different forms," Edery said. "The IDF made use of phosphorous shells during the war against Hezbollah in attacks against military targets in open ground."

Edery also pointed out that international law does not forbid the use of phosphorus and that "the IDF used this type of munitions according to the rules of international law."

Edery did not specify where and against what types of targets phosphorus munitions were used. During the war several foreign media outlets reported that Lebanese civilians carried injuries characteristic of attacks with phosphorus, a substance that burns when it comes to contact with air. In one CNN report, a casualty with serious burns was seen lying in a South Lebanon hospital.

In another case, Dr. Hussein Hamud al-Shel, who works at Dar al-Amal hospital in Ba'albek, said that he had received three corpses "entirely shriveled with black-green skin," a phenomenon characteristic of phosphorus injuries.

Lebanon's President Emile Lahoud also claimed that the IDF made use of phosphorus munitions against civilians in Lebanon.

Phosphorus has been used by armies since World War I. During World War II and Vietnam the U.S. and British armies made extensive use of phosphorus. During recent decades the tendency has been to ban the use of phosphorus munitions against any target, civilian or military, because of the severity of the injuries that the substance causes.

Some experts believe that phosphorus munitions should be termed Chemical Weapons (CW) because of the way the weapons burn and attack the respiratory system. As a CW, phosphorus would become a clearly illegal weapon.

The International Red Cross is of the opinion that there should be a complete ban on phosphorus being used against human beings and the third protocol of the Geneva Convention on Conventional Weapons restricts the use of "incendiary weapons," with phosphorus considered to be one such weapon.

Israel and the United States are not signatories to the Third Protocol.

In November 2004 the U.S. Army used phosphorus munitions during an offensive in Faluja, Iraq. Burned bodies of civilians hit by the phosphorus munitions were shown by the press, and an international outcry against the practice followed.

Initially the U.S. denied that it had used phosphorus bombs against humans, but then acknowledged that during the assault targets that were neither civilian nor population concentrations were hit with such munitions. Israel also says that the use of "incendiary munitions are not in themselves illegal."

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