The grotesquely misnamed Human Rights Watch, among others, has been throwing around claims that Israel has been making illegal use of phosphorus shells in Gaza. Phosphorus is permitted to illuminate the scene of battle but not for use against human targets. Israel has repeatedly denied that it is making illegal use of phosphorus. Now Peter Herby, the head of the mines-arms unit of the International Committee of the Red Cross, has told the Associated Press:
‘But it’s not very unusual to use phosphorus to create smoke or illuminate a target. We have no evidence to suggest it’s being used in any other way’. In response, the IDF said Tuesday that it ‘wishes to reiterate that it uses weapons in compliance with international law, while strictly observing that they be used in accordance with the type of combat and its characteristics.’ Herby said that using phosphorus to illuminate a target or create smoke is legitimate under international law, and that there was no evidence the Jewish state was intentionally using phosphorus in a questionable way, such as burning down buildings or knowingly putting civilians at risk.
But as various reports have noted, one of the shells Hamas fired on Tuesday from Gaza did contain white phosphorus. And that sure as hell wasn’t to illuminate the field of battle. It was solely aimed at killing and maiming civilians. So where’s the outrage at this banned use of white phosphorus by Hamas from all the people who have been falsely accusing Israel of this behaviour?
Not from the Independent newspaper, for sure. Its fashionable new columnist appears to be the Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Hanieyeh (He Is: Are You?). Haniyeh takes the opportunity to repeat the claim that 1000 Gazans have been killed by the Israelis of whom nearly half are women and children. He also claims that when Israel shelled the UNRWA school (he omits to say that this was return fire in response to Hamas firing rockets from a yard adjacent to the school) forty-six children and women were killed.
The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) has been parroting those civilian casualty figures which have been widely accepted in the west. But according to the head of the IDF’s Gaza Coordination and Liaison Administration (CLA), Col. Moshe Levi,the CLA had compiled a list with the names of 900 of the Palestinians killed during the fighting.
He said that 150 names were of women, children and elderly and that the maximum number of civilians killed so far was 250… Levi also dismissed OCHA’s claim that 43 Palestinians were killed in an IDF attack on a Hamas terror cell that was firing mortars at Israeli forces from within an UNRWA school in Jabalya. Levi said that the CLA knew of 21 Palestinians killed in the attack, including a number of Hamas operatives.
In war, accurate figures are of course very hard to come by. In general, the Israelis tell the truth. They may not tell the whole truth; and on occasion they provide information which is later shown to be wrong. But in general, experience shows that their default position is honesty. By contrast, Hamas have been shown time and again to tell bare-faced lies, fabricating not just casualty figures but staging ‘Pallywood’-style ‘atrocities’ to hoodwink the media — not to mention their Nazi-style libels about the Jewish people. Yet the media choose to believe Hamas and disbelieve the Israelis. Why?
One final question: when Foreign Secretary David Miliband, UN Secretary-General Ban-ki Moon and a zillion others in the west lament the 1000 in Gaza whom the Israelis have killed, are they lamenting the killing of the 75 per cent-plus of that total who were Hamas terrorists, whose purpose in life was to annihilate Israel and exterminate Jews? Are they lamenting the killing today of the key senior Hamas leader Said Siyam,said to have been a radical close to Iran? Would they have preferred that all these individuals remained alive to continue pursuing their genocidal project? Are they saying that no-one should be killed in war and that therefore there should never be war? And if so, when will we hear Miliband similarly lament all those Taleban who have been and are still being killed by British forces in Afghanistan, along with al Qaeda in Iraq
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