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

I believe Israel, US and Iran should be charged with crimes against humanity based on the development, support and usage of these wicked weapons.

Real shame that those who complain the most are easily the ones that will inflict the most wicked form of pain on people.

I find this extremely scary.

How on earth can man do this to man and turn round to accuse the other man of terrorism?

I am sure God will neither sleep nor slumber and He will mete out justice in His time.

I await the comments of the Bush/American apologists

There is no justification for this.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID={2124E243-7360-4A15-8222-A44879E625C4}

Careful to avoid leveling direct accusations himself, Fisk built his case by quoting uncritically and at length the claims of Dr. Chris Busby, UK Green Party technology spokesman and scientific secretary of the European Committee on Radiation Risk, that evidence gathered from bomb craters at al-Khiam and At-Tiri indicated that the IDF had used either “some novel small experimental nuclear fission device or other experimental weapon (e.g. thermobaric weapon) … [or] a bunker-busting conventional uranium penetrator weapon employing enriched uranium.”

The result, the article intimated, would be a public health catastrophe in Lebanon on a par with the “plague of cancers” which Fisk, despite International Atomic Energy Association (IAEA) and World Health Organisation (WHO) findings to the contrary, maintains U.S. use of depleted uranium (DU) is causing in southern Iraq. Israeli denials of uranium-based munitions use in Lebanon were presented as inherently unreliable and “begging more questions than they answered.”


Curiously, Fisk made no mention of the October 12th report by the Amsterdam-based nuclear research and documentation centre, the Laka Foundation, which found “no reason to believe that DU weaponry has been used by Israel during the July/August 2006 war.” And in the months since his article’s publication he has remained resolutely silent on the series of other investigations which have comprehensively discredited the uranium bomb theory. For instance, one week after Fisk’s piece appeared, Lebanon’s National Council for Scientific Research (NCSR) declared that there were “no signs of radiation as a result of IDF bombing … uranium-based munitions were not used during the recent war.”


Five days later, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) issued a statement confirming that soil samples taken from 32 sites throughout Lebanon showed “no evidence of penetrators or metal made of DU or other radioactive material” and “no depleted uranium, enriched uranium or higher than natural uranium content in the samples.”


More recently on February 26th, representatives of the Lebanese Army, the Arab Atomic Agency, the Lebanese Atomic Energy Commission, the IAEA, UNEP and the WHO unanimously agreed at a an NCSR-sponsored symposium that there was no evidence of uranium-based munitions use during the 2006 Lebanon conflict, “depleted, natural, or enriched.”

http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200611/s1783385.htm
No evidence of uranium-based munitions in Lebanon: UN
UN experts have found no evidence to support a press report that Israel used depleted uranium (DU) munitions during the July-August conflict in Lebanon, the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) says.

"The samples taken by the UNEP scientists show no evidence of penetrators or metal made of DU or other radioactive material," UNEP Executive Director Achim Steiner said in a statement.

"In addition, no DU shrapnel, or other radioactive residue was found. The analysis of all smear samples taken shows no DU, nor enriched uranium nor higher than natural uranium content in the samples."



This was in sharp contrast to the lies told by the Independent .

But then again, the original article was written by Robert Fisk. here's some more about the fellow.

Two weeks later, he took issue with a New York Times’ op-ed by Larry Collins which stated that Hizballah was stockpiling Iranian-made missiles in Lebanon which had the capacity to wreak unprecedented devastation as far south as Haifa. “The missiles are a myth,” sneered Fisk in the London Independent. “I travel the roads of southern Lebanon every two weeks and there are no such missiles.” Hundreds of these mythical missiles rained down on northern Israel during the Second Lebanon War. And after Ariel Sharon’s vow of revenge for al-Qaeda’s attack on Israeli targets in Mombassa the following December, Fisk ominously warned that Jerusalem was taking on “its most dangerous opponent in 54 years,” a “ruthless, highly-motivated, intelligent” force that could prove “more than a match for Israel’s third-rate intelligence men [and] … rabble of an army.” This doom-mongering was made all the more risible by the fact that Fisk had described the IDF as “the Middle East's mightiest army” just six months before.


http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID={2124E243-7360-4A15-8222-A44879E625C4}

otokx:

There is no justification for this.

Wrong. there's no justification for you to believe improbable news without any research whatsoever, no excuse or justification to pass judgement without a clear study of the issue inoled, the accusations made.

One more. . .

http://www.laka.org/info/publicaties/vu/2006-lebanon-eng.html

Press release, Amsterdam, 12th October, 2006
Depleted Uranium (DU) munitions used in Lebanon?

During and after the 33-days war in Lebanon the story was rumoured that the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) should have used DU antitank shells or other types of munitions made from DU. The attention was especially focussed on the article "Scientists suspect Israeli arms used in South contain radioactive matter" by Mohammed Zaatari in the Daily Star (August 21, 2006) in which nuclear physicist Dr. Ali Kobeissi, a member of the Lebanese National Council for Scientific Research said that a crater caused by an Israeli munition in Khiam contained "a high degree of unidentified radioactive materials."
Many people within the movement against uranium weapons considered Kobeissi's statements as a "piece of evidence" for the alleged use of DU by the IDF.
In order to verify or to falsify the assertions that DU has been used, Henk van der Keur from the Laka Foundation brought a visit to Lebanon as part of a delegation from the Amsterdam based organisation Dromen, Denk, Durven, Doen (Dreaming, Thinking, to Dare, to Do), among others working on human rights issues and questions on the Middle East.

On September 25 Van der keur visited Dr. Kobeissi in Nabatiyeh. Dr. Kobeissi told that he tested some deep pits made by Israeli weapons with a geiger counter from a local scrap dealer and that his results indicated the presence of uranium. He stressed that he has never said 'depleted uranium' and regretted the political bickerings between different sects. He measured 50 nanosievert (nSv) per hour in the outside rim of the pits and 300 nSv in the heart of most pits with the exception of one which measured 800 nsV/h. He also declared that these dose rates in the pits decreased considerably day by day. On the suggestion that these higher measures could be due to the concentration of uranium in the ash ('concentrated background radiation from the burnt material') he agreed that this possibility is highly likely.

At his home Kobeissi had collected tens of samples from shrapnel and soil from more than 50 different places. None of these samples measured a higher radiation dose rate than the background radiation dose rate. The samples were measured with a calibrated geiger counter from Laka Foundation.

Finally there is no reason to assume that the IDF has used DU antitank shells. Firstly there were no armored targets in Lebanon and secondly the Mine clearance teams - present on many places in the south of Lebanon, especially because of the enormous abundance of cluster bombs - haven't found any spent DU antitank shells.

According to Peter Boeckhart, who is in charge for making reports in post-conflict areas for Human Rights Watch, only a few bunker busters have been used in Lebanon (on bridges), but he couldn't tell where. No chance that these munitions were equiped with a load of DU. Instead of bunker buster types of munitions Boeckhart said that the use of serial bombing was much more seen. A mosque in Beirut was bombed with a load of more than 20 tons by serial bombing.

In short, there is no reason to believe that DU weaponry has been used by Israel during the July/August 2006 war.

Henk van der Keur
Laka Foundation
www.laka.org

Many people don't know Robert Fisk.I remember him coming on radio,BBC World Service in 2001,to state that Kandahar will not fall to the Northern Alliance and if it did,it will take many months. 4 days later Kandahar fell without much of a fight.

The man is a tendentious pundit given to glib idiocy.