ISRAEL USES DIME BOMBS IN GAZA

Israel’s invasion of Gaza bears a striking resemblance to its ill-fated war in Lebanon in 2006 in which it failed to defeat Hezbollah. This time round, it was unable to destroy Hamas. However, the campaign may well be remembered for the fact that the Israeli Defense Forces experimented with at least one a new weapon in an urban setting.
According to doctors, who treated the thousands of injured, and the more than one thousand dead Palestinians, one of the weapons that featured in the 22 day bombardment of Gaza was the DIME bomb - dense inert metal explosive - which causes horrifying injuries. It is composed of tungsten and high tensile steel alloys called HTMAs which, according to a 2005 Department of Health report, can cause cancer. The weapon was developed by the U.S. military, which has not tested it on the battlefield and by all accounts regards it as being at the experimental stage. That did not stop Israel first using it in a limited way in Gaza in the summer of 2006, firing it from drones. However, at that time, the Israel military denied having it and doctors were unable to prove otherwise even though they noticed patients with severe injuries that has no signs of shrapnel.
Explosives experts say a Dime bomb narrows the range of the explosion it creates and intensifies its impact within a narrow radius. According to Italian investigative reporters, who were first to draw attention to the existence of the weapon, it is a precision device developed in the U.S. in 2005. The U.S. military was keen to have DIME bombs in its arsenal for use in urban areas of Iraq and Afghanistan because they had the potential to limit the kind of collateral damage often caused by conventional explosives. When a regular bomb explodes in an urban setting the blast extends outwards over a wide area, often inflicting unnecessary casualties. For reasons yet unknown, the U.S. military did not do any battlefield tests on DIME in Iraq or Afghanistan and it was left to the Israelis to test its effectiveness. So far, there has been no admission by the U.S. that it supplied Israel with DIME bombs or the technology to build them.
Nevertheless, there is now evidence, gleaned from photographs of wounded civilians in Lebanon in 2006, which confirms DIMEs were fired from Israeli drones. In the latest 22-day shock and awe bombardment of Gaza, physicians and surgeons were quickly confronted by wounds they had not seen before. Eric Fosse, a Norwegian surgeon, who has worked in Gaza for some time, is convinced DIME weapons were used a lot because some of the people he treated had terrible injuries that showed no evidence of shrapnel. He says it was as if tungsten, which explodes like a powder when a Dime weapon hits its target, had “dissolved” into tissue, leaving no obvious trace. There were also signs of intense heat at the site of severe amputations. There is a possibility DIME bombs were not the only experimental weapons used in Gaza because some surgeons reported seeing injuries which defied explanation and did not appear to have been caused by traditional explosive shells or missiles. For example, in some instances surgeons could not stop bleeding from wounds. The reaction of the Israeli military to these claims is that it abides by international law.
If the past is anything to go by, calls now being made for a U.N. inquiry into the use of DIME bombs and white phosphorous in Gaza will go unheeded. It is not the first time Israel has knowingly used such weapons in a fashion that contravenes the Geneva conventions, and it may not be the last. Anytime U.N. bodies have condemned the IDF Israeli leaders have shrugged off the matter, claiming the U.N. is anti-Semitic. Israel also appears immune to world criticism, confident that it has the backing of Washington. It knows the U.S. will always block any attempt by the U.N.’s highest body, the Security Council, to censure it. It is also dismissive of the International Court in The Hague, which may well open an investigation into the latest bombardment of Gaza. Over decades, there have been scores of U.N. resolutions condemning Israel – 65 of them between 1955 through 1992 – yet Israel ignored them all.
After the war in Lebanon in 2006, many international groups were disappointed the U.N. did not launch an inquiry into Israel’s use of cluster munitions, which it acquired from the United States. There was clear evidence that Israel deliberately fired 1,800 cluster munitions containing 1.2 million bomblets into Lebanon. After the war, an IDF commander told the Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, that “what we did was insane and monstrous. We covered entire towns in cluster bombs.”
The problem with cluster munitions is that they are indiscriminate weapons that do not always detonate on impact. The bomblets can lie in soil for years, only exploding when a child or adult steps on them. Haaretz also carried reports that Israeli soldiers fired phosphorous shells into Lebanon, breaching international laws, which ban the use of that weapon against civilians or military.
One of the big questions arising from the latest invasion of Gaza is what did Israel actually achieve. For 22-days, its military pounded Gaza from land and air without stating its goals. By all accounts, Hamas did not put up much of a fight and therefore kept most of its structure in place. That has left many observers with the feeling that the invasion was an exercise in revenge, designed to hurt the civilian population with the aim of detaching it from Hamas. In other words, the Israelis believed that if Palestinian civilians suffered enough they would be more likely to blame Hamas, thereby weakening its power base. If that was the strategy, it was a naïve one. The survival of Hamas, allied to unprecedented levels of bitterness throughout the Arab world, can only serve to embolden Hamas the way the invasion of Lebanon in 2006 energized Hezbollah. Israel’s news blackout on its Gaza operation also proved counterproductive, though not in terms of the only audience Israel cared about, namely the American public. By preventing media access the battlefield Israel knew that American cable channels, unlike their European counterparts, would not use footage from Al Jazeera, the only television network with staff in Gaza. As a consequence, the American public saw little of the carnage and the killing of civilians, making it possible for Israel to engage in a limited war, which ultimately may prove to be yet another failure. Even the news censorship ensured that the majority of people across the globe saw only Al Jazeera’s coverage of dead and injured Palestinians, portraying Israel as the aggressor.