Gaza: Death's Laboratory

[subsuelo]

Erik Fosse, a Norwegian cardiologist, worked in Gaza hospitals during the recent war."It was as if they had stepped on a mine," he says of certain Palestinian patients he treated. "But there was no shrapnel in the wound. Some had lost their legs. It looked as though they had been sliced off. I have been to war zones for 30 years, but I have never seen such injuries before."

Dr. Fosse was describing the effects of a U.S. "focused lethality" weapon that minimizes explosive damage to structures while inflicting catastrophic wounds on its victims. But where did the Israelis get this weapon? And was their widespread use in the attack on Gaza a field test for a new generation of explosives?

The specific weapon is called a Dense Inert Metal Explosive (DIME). In 2000, the U.S. Air Force teamed up with the University of California's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The weapon wraps high explosives with a tungsten alloy and other metals like cobalt, nickel, or iron in a carbon fiber/epoxy container. When the bomb explodes the container evaporates, and the tungsten turns into micro-shrapnel that is extremely lethal within a 13–foot radius. Tungsten is inert, so it doesn't react chemically with the explosive. While a non-inert metal like aluminum would increase the blast, tungsten actually contains the explosion to a limited area.

Within the weapon's range, however, it's inordinately lethal. According to Norwegian doctor Mad Gilbert, the blast results in multiple amputations and "very severe fractures. The muscles are sort of split from the bones, hanging loose, and you also have quite severe burns." Most of those who survive the initial blast quickly succumb to septicemia and organ collapse. "Initially, everything seems in order…but it turns out on operation that dozens of miniature particles can be found in all their organs," says Dr. Jam Brommundt, a German doctor working in Kham Younis, a city in southern Gaza. "It seems to be some sort of explosive or shell that disperses tiny particles…that penetrate all organs, these miniature injuries, you are not able to attack them surgically." According to Brommundt, the particles cause multiple organ failures.

http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/5862">Foreign Policy In Focus - read more

[ProgressiveProfessor]

1. More DIME nonsense, from the same team that started it.

[grassfed]

2. Mustafa Barghouti

The old people Barghouti talked to said they had never seen anything like it either--not in ’48, ’56, ’67, '88, or 2000. "They all told me that this has been the most brutal thing they have ever seen." And so his job today, before getting to any politics, was to bear witness to a room filled to bursting with 220 people or so, many of them Palestinian intellectuals in the Diaspora, as Barghouti put it.

It is hard to convey Barghouti’s presentation in a piece of writing without being numbing. He showed us gruesome photos of the mysterious armaments that burned their way down into people’s flesh, eating their skin and tissue away. He told the stories of five daughters killed in one family, and of another two girls who watched their father, who had left the house after three days to get water, shot and bound and left in the street to serve as a target dummy. His wife and daughters watched their father executed. "That is the story I heard from his wife," he said, voice breaking.

He said that families that had fled the attacks often divided their children and left them in different houses, so that a strike would not kill all their children at once. And the Gazans had reason to fear this: the killing of 1300 is equivalent to a quarter million Americans dying.

"Have you see these images on U.S. television?" One picture after another of leveled neighborhoods, bulldozed factories. Before the onslaught, there had been 351 working factories left in Gaza, "the last remaining part of the private sector that was not destroyed yet." Most were destroyed. "They were destroyed when the Israeli army was leaving Gaza in the last two days.The Israeli army put dynamite in them." He showed us pictures of one man’s factory where the Israelis in leaving had demolished the factory, his gardens, his trucks, his cars.

"And up to this moment they are not allowing a single sack of cement to enter Gaza." And most of the glass in Gaza was shattered, but glass is not allowed in either, as a "strategic material." Windows are covered with plastic.

Of course, this kind of horror requires analysis, and it was here that the talk left the realm of physical destruction to go the true devastation, the Israeli soul.

http://www.philipweiss.org/mondoweiss/2009/02/barghouti-to-obama-2-states-now-or-a-long-violent-struggle-over-apartheid-because-we-will-be-free.html

[Scurrilous]

3. In Gaza town, a bitter aftermath

Witnesses say white flags didn't keep Israeli troops from firing at and killing Palestinians. Incident in Khozaa could be key to any war crimes probe.

<snip>

"She was the strongest among them, the natural leader. So when the shelling stopped and the Israeli soldiers announced through loudspeakers that all residents should come out of their homes and head for the center of town, neighbors turned to Rawhiya Najar for guidance.

Emptying the cupboards of sheets and tablecloths -- anything white -- she led a procession of 20 women and children into the streets holding a white flag in each hand, residents say.

The group had made it perhaps 200 yards when a soldier stepped out from a door down the street and shot Najar in the head, multiple witnesses say. Her body lay in the street for 12 hours, villagers and doctors say.

Weeks after Israel declared a unilateral end to its offensive in the Gaza Strip, the aftermath still burns in Khozaa, a farm town of 11,000 in the south of the territory. Chunks of white phosphorus still lie scattered throughout neighborhoods, buried in dirt and sand; when excavated, they immediately ignite and spew noxious smoke that smells vaguely of garlic.

As the International Criminal Court weighs a war crimes investigation of the Gaza offensive, the experience of Khozaa could be a key part in the evidence. It was here that Israeli troops staged a series of incursions from Jan. 11 to 13, facing off against local militant fighters and leaving a trail of accusations and recriminations in their wake.

These include charges of indiscriminate firing on civilians and ambulances and what one international weapons expert called the heaviest use of controversial white phosphorus munitions in the 22-day offensive.

Local officials say 19 people were killed during the assault, 16 of them civilians. About 150 people were injured, most from prolonged exposure to phosphorus smoke, local medical officials say.

It is impossible to fully confirm many of the details of what happened here. But interviews with more than a dozen Khozaa residents, medical professionals, government officials and local militant fighters depict a chaotic three-day span when phosphorus smoke filled the streets and homes as families cowered indoors."

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[Shaktimaan]

4. do you believe everything you read?

Or just the things that bolster the beliefs that you already hold?

Don't you find it a little strange that the only information about these DIME weapons being used in Gaza has consistently come from this same small group of Norwegian doctors who always make accusations of this sort? Accusations which have never been proven or even been given any real consideration aside from these few people and press who repeat their statements.

That said, even if these DIME weapon accusations turn out to be completely true, what exactly is so horrible about them? It seems to me that the main trait of this weapon is to inflict severe damage to an extremely small area, essentially killing anyone who stands within the weapon's range while leaving everyone else, and any buildings and infrastructure unharmed. Why would you consider a weapon of this sort to be more inhumane than a conventional bomb, which would kill anyone it landed next to just as surely as a DIME weapon while also destroying everyone and everything else within a large blast radius?