JERUSALEM (AFP) — Israel's bombardment of heavily populated areas of the Gaza Strip with white phosphorous munitions violated international law and could constitute war crimes, a human rights group said on Wednesday.
The Israeli military "repeatedly exploded white phosphorous munitions in the air over populated areas, killing and injuring civilians and damaging civilian structures, including a school, a market, a humanitarian aid warehouse and a hospital," the New York-based Human Rights Watch said in a new report.
"The (military's) repeated firing of air-burst white phosphorous shells from 155mm artillery into densely populated areas was indiscriminate and indicates the commission of war crimes."
The conclusions in the 71-page report were based on an investigation carried out in Gaza in January immediately after Israel's massive three-week military offensive that killed more than 1,300 Palestinians.
Israel insisted during the war that all the weapons it used were allowed under international law and said it strove to avoid needless civilian deaths. Ten Israeli soldiers and three civilians were killed during the conflict.
International law allows the use of white phosphorous, which ignites upon contact with oxygen and burns at extremely high temperatures, to be used on open battlefields to create a smoke screen to obscure troop movements.
But the weapon's use is prohibited in densely populated areas, where it can light fires that are virtually impossible to extinguish and inflict severe burn wounds.
"The Israeli military didn't just use white phosphorous in open areas as a screen for its troops," Fred Abrahams, a co-author of the report said.
"It fired white phosphorous repeatedly over densely populated areas, even when its troops weren't in the area and safer smoke shells were available. As a result civilians needlessly suffered and died."
The report added that all the white phosphorous shells it found were manufactured in the United States in 1989 by Thiokol Aerospace.
In one such attack the main compound of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees in Gaza City was set alight by white phosphorous, destroying a warehouse holding more than 10 million dollars worth of humanitarian aid.
The Human Rights Watch report quotes a former US army officer who said he repeatedly contacted the Israeli military to warn them that the shells were falling too close to the compound, where some 700 people were sheltering.
"I called the IDF (Israeli military) coordination unit at Erez to try to get them to stop it," Scott Anderson, a field officer at the UN agency, said.
"It was hitting the compound itself for about an hour."
The report comes amid mounting allegations of the deliberate targeting of civilians during the 22-day war aimed at halting Palestinian rocket fire from the territory ruled by the Islamist Hamas movement.
Last week the journal of a pre-military academy published excerpts of a conference in which Israeli veterans of the Gaza war described the wanton killing of civilians and destruction of property.
Army chief of staff Lieutenant General Gabi Ashkenazi on Monday dismissed the allegations, saying he did not believe that Israeli troops "hurt Palestinian civilians in cold blood."
"We will wait the outcome of an investigation, but my impression is that the IDF acted morally and if such cases did take place they were isolated."
The rights group Physicians for Human Rights-Israel has meanwhile accused Israeli forces of violating international law by attacking paramedics and medical facilities and preventing the rescue of wounded civilians.
The military responded by saying that Hamas militants had taken shelter in and around such facilities and used ambulances to transport wounded fighters.
Israel has vowed to carry out its own investigations into allegations of the killing of civilians in Gaza but has also censored the names of all soldiers who served in the war to shield them from possible war crimes charges.
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| Alleged burning white phosphorous in Gaza City |
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