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Now
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 and 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 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.
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