Israel used depleted uranium in offensive on Gaza -- NGOs

DU kills | 24.05.2009 11:49

The use of WMDs in Gaza

http://www.kuna.net.kw/NewsAgenciesPublicSite/ArticleDetails.aspx?id=2000300&Language=en

Military and Security 5/23/2009 12:52:00 PM

GENEVA, May 23 (KUNA) -- Action of Citizens for the total Dismantling of Nukes (ACDN) said Saturday that it has just produced a 33-page report concluding that the presence of as much as 75 tons of depleted uranium in Gaza soil is highly probable to the Israeli "Operation Cast Lead" offensive.
The operation took place between December 27, 2008 and January 18, 2009.
During the first few days, a Norwegian doctor doing humanitarian service in the hospital at Shifa, Dr Mads Gilbert, denounced the presence of radioactive matter, possibly depleted uranium, in the bodies of victims.
This accusation has now emerged with greater strength after several months of investigation carried out in close liaison with the people concerned and with the help of Jean-Francois Fechino, a consultant on diffuse pollution and an expert accredited to the UN Environment (UNEP).
In April 2009, a four-person mission including Fechino, went to Gaza under the auspices of the Arab Commission for Human Rights.
The samples of earth and dust that they brought back from Gaza were then analysed by a specialist laboratory, which found in them elements of depleted uranium (which is radioactive, carcinogenic, teratogenic), particles of cesium (which is radioactive and carcinogenic), asbestos dust (which is carcinogenic), volatile organic compounds (VOCs, which are fine particles which endanger health, especially the health of children, asthmatics and old people), phosphates (from oxidation of white phosphorus), tungsten (which is carcinogenic), copper, aluminium oxide (which is carcinogenic), and thorium oxide (ThO2, which is radioactive). (end) hn.ema KUNA 231252 May 09NNNN

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Comments

Hide the following 16 comments

Depleted uranium is simply a dense metal

24.05.2009 15:53

Who cares, this is simply a use of the word "uranium" to scare people and make them think of radioactivity. In reality depleted uranium is simply used because it is a very dense metal and so can penetrate armoured targets.

It is an appeal to emotion and ignorance rather than reason.

Observer

75 tonnes you claim

24.05.2009 16:33

Let's see: 75 tonnes = 75000 kilograms or maybe 160000 lb in old money.
If 1300 Gazans died during Operation Cast Depleted Uranium, that makes nearly 60 kg of DU per head or around 130 lbs.
Can we safely assume that this self-appointed "NGO" (i.e. anti-Israeli hate group) is talking utter bollocks?
Still, I look forward to reading this as yet unpublished report and being able to analyse the methodology which they used to arrive at their conclusions.

Operation Cast Depleted Uranium

Depleted Unranium is dangerous

24.05.2009 19:08

Depleted Unranium is toxic, normal functioning of the kidney, brain, liver, heart, and numerous other systems can be affected by uranium exposure.

During impact and combustion of depleted uranium munitions wide areas can be contaminated around the impact sites or can be inhaled by civilians.

1000 tons of depleted uranium munitions were reported used in the three week invasion of Iraq.

Paul

Israels Got Talent

24.05.2009 20:13

Hahaha the comments are killing me. Standard Propaganda.

First comment,
DU isn't dangerous.

Second comment ,
DU is dangerous but there wasn't that much of it.

Third comment,
DU was dangerous and there was a lot of it, but the person who reported it is an unreliable flake.

I don't know if there was DU used in Gaza, but I do know two things. There is PRopagandist comments here against that story, and genuine and undeniable crimes against humanity were committed in Gaza by the IDF that have went unpunished that include the use of inhumane weaponary.

Danny

Analysis

25.05.2009 10:15

Unless they used a mass spectroscope, it is impossible to tell whether any uranium found was DU or natural uranium. Urnaium is found in soil throughtout the world - it is a natural occuring mineral. As to the other materials there - I would defy people to find soil samples which didn't contain aluminium oxide. Most of tis is scaremongering.

DUmb

Definition of some one disagrees with me

25.05.2009 16:08

... a paid Israeli agent.

Just because some nutter shouts 'depleted uranium!', and people point out he's a utter nutter, doesn't mean to say the full weight of Mossad has descended onto the Indymedia comment section.

mercenary

re 75 ton claim

25.05.2009 16:25

So 75 tons is a thousand kg, that's spot on. But what has that got to do with 1300 dead Palestinians
at 60 kg a head, so there fore the evil Israel hating NGO's state is a load of bollox ?
You must have multiplied the whole article by the angle of the dangle added to it the fact that your a total
tosser and your sums have absolute no reverence or relevance what so ever and ever ..

50 quid to mend the shed

Far right

25.05.2009 17:13

"The death toll in Gaza is enough to almost justify any new pogrom. You have become the demons your ancestors were falsely portrayed as. Your current actions have almost justified the holocaust in retrospect."

I didn't realise I'd stumbled into a BNP website.

adolf

Israel = nazi germany

25.05.2009 20:56

1 Shot, Two Kills

Levis tortured ghost
Homepage: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9mJp5d3ffP8

Israel=Nazi Germany

26.05.2009 07:00

Oh, yes, indeed - every morning from my front window I see the trains rolling by, full of men, women and children, all with the fateful tatoo on their wrist, and then in the afternoon I see the smoke curling up from the crematorium. A few hundred more down, only a few million left to go.

shalom

A shoah for Gaza

26.05.2009 09:48

Matan Vilnai promised a Shoah for Gaza in 2008. It wasn't an empty threat.

Matan Vilnai

Shoah in Israel

26.05.2009 10:21

Number of Israelis killed by Palestinians since September 2000: 1,182

So who are the new Nazis?

pax vobiscumque

Murdering by numbers

27.05.2009 17:03

>Number of Israelis killed by Palestinians since September 2000: 1,182

"At least 6,348 Palestinians and 1,072 Israelis have been killed since September 29, 2000"

That is a 2005 figure from

http://www.ifamericansknew.org/stats/deaths.html, so it obviously excludes the thousand plus killed in Gaza since then.

>So who are the new Nazis?

If you are basing it on numbers, then obviously the Israelis who are the Nazis in that conflict. They have the overwhelming military superiority, the complicity of the ruling powers, the most barbaric wepaonary and the motivations of racial purity. None of these things are moral or racist arguments, most Israelis would recognise these facts.

I want to be clear, the US and the UK has killed more people - more arabs - during the same period with less justification, and so we don't have to look as far as Israel to find the inheritors of the German Nazi regime. It is just especially disappoining that a people who suffered genocide would inflict it, and opnely threaten to inflict it, upon others. Even the Nazis claimed falsely self-defence.

Danny

"In whole, or in part"

27.05.2009 23:49

>To call the deaths of 1000 or 6000 over several years 'genocide' is stretching the definition of the word beyond its elastic limit.

Very true. However international law is very clear and concise about this, and these are 'acts of genocide'.
It is sad to see Israelis try to defend the slaughter in Gaza and the rest of Palestine when Israel was one of the first signatories to the convention. The same rules apply when your army is doing the killing or the rules are meaningless when your people are being slaughtered.

1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (CPPCG). Article 2,

"any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life, calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; [and] forcibly transferring children of the group to another group."

The IDF is currently genocidal by the defininion Israel signed up to. Shame is too small a word for that hypocracy.

Danny

another elastic definition

28.05.2009 06:30

'in whole or in part' ...

So, does 'in part' mean the death of 1 person, 100 people, 1000?

'with intent to destroy ... a national, ethnical, racial or religious group'. So country A goes to war with country B. Some people in Country B are killed. Is this an intent to destroy a national group? After all, people from that group have been killed. Therefore any war between any two countries will involve acts of genocide on both parts.

And firing unguided rockets indiscriminately into another country with the aim of killing as many people as possible. Is that genocide? Leaving bombs on buses to kill civilians - is that genocide?

By your definition, the IRA are guilty of genocide. You know, those nice people who now sit in government in Stormont.

status quo

"By your definition"

28.05.2009 22:16

Thing is, that isn't 'my definition', that is the legal definition decided long before I was born, which every decent nation signed up to and supports. You aren't arguing against me, you are arguing against the Geneva Conventions which Israel was one of the first signatories to.

It applies to states that are signatories, and has recently been expanded to states that haven't signed it (Sudan), it doesn't apply to non-state actors such as the modern IRA, who are governed and judged by the laws of the countries they operate in.

Danny