Accusations that Israel employs diabolical and sometimes even secret weapons against its enemies are not new.
Back in October 2006, Robert Fisk was given the front page of the UK’s Independent to spread the libel that Israel had used uranium-based weapons in southern Lebanon. The charge was debunked yet Fisk and the Independent have never, to this day, retracted this libel.
In 2006, Norwegian radical anti-Israel doctor Mads Gilbert was given a platform by the world’s media to charge Israel with the following:
“There’s a very strong suspicion I think that Gaza is now being used as a test laboratory for new weapons,” Mads Gilbert told reporters at Oslo’s Gardermoen airport, commenting on the kinds of injuries he and his colleague Erik Fosse had seen while working at the Shifa Hospital in Gaza.
The two medics, who were sent into the war zone by the pro-Palestinian aid organisation NORWAC on December 31, said they had seen clear signs that Dense Inert Metal Explosives (DIME), an experimental kind of explosive, were being used in Gaza.
“This is a new generation of very powerful small explosives that detonates with an extreme power and dissipates its power within a range of five to 10 metres (16-98 feet),” said Gilbert, 61.
“We have not seen the casualties affected directly by the bomb because they are normally torn to pieces and do not survive, but we have seen a number of very brutal amputations… without shrapnel injuries which we strongly suspect must have been caused by the DIME weapons,” he added.
Fast forward to the present day and the Irish Times has published the following, written, incidentally, by Robert Fisk’s ex-wife, Lara Marlowe:
Doctors and an ambulance officer believe Israel tested new weapons during its July 8th – August 26th assault on the Gaza Strip.
Ambulance officer Ibrahim Abu Kas of the Palestinian Red Crescent Society has worked through the last three wars between Israel and Hamas. “In this war, I saw things I never could have imagined,” he says. “The five children from the al-Jaal family in Zeitoun were the strangest thing I ever saw in my life.”
The room where three girls and two boys were sleeping was hit by an Israeli tank shell while their mother, father and grandmother sat in another room. “Their bodies were hot. Their hair and skin were black liked charred wood. When their parents arrived at the hospital, they didn’t recognise them,” Abu Kas continues. “But there had been no fire, only white smoke.”
The unsubstantiated rumors and innuendo continue:
Doctors at Shifa hospital heard rumours of chemical weapons or gas. “I saw a man whose limbs were jerking and he could not breathe before he died, but he had no wounds,” Abu Kas recounts. Earlier, he had picked up people who were suffocating but survived.
While he makes no accusations of this nature, it’s no coincidence that Mads Gilbert is once again on the scene:
Whatever new weapons Israel may have used, “The worst illegal weapons are the siege, which is illegal collective punishment, the disproportionate use of force and the lack of discrimination between civilian and military targets,” says the Norwegian doctor Mads Gilbert, who worked at Shifa during the war.
Perhaps most interestingly is the input of Dr Sobhi Skaik, chief surgeon and medical director at Shifa hospital, in the Irish Times story. For Dr Skaik was also making almost identical accusations in 2006:
What is happening is frightening. It’s possible the Israeli army was using Gaza to experiment militarily.
. . .
Local doctors say a number of both widespread and unusual injuries may indicate that new types of weapons were used on the Gaza population during the war. Health officials are seeing wounds they have never seen before, or at least not on such a massive scale.
“There has been a significant loss of life here in Gaza for reasons that are unexplainable medically,” said Dr. Skaik.
That Israel has advanced weapons that are capable of causing immense destruction is not a surprise. Neither is it a surprise that the same politicized medical professionals should be promoting a story that Israel is employing weapons that are so diabolical as to be like nothing ever used by any other conventional army.
Lara Marlowe’s story is based on already discredited “eyewitnesses.” Had she looked into the history of these types of libels, perhaps she would have approached her story with a healthier degree of skepticism. However, based on a series of one-sided pieces from Gaza written by Marlowe since the beginning of the month, it is more likely that she was only too willing to believe the latest weapons libel to emerge from Gaza.
Image: CC BY-NC-SA Jared Rodriguez/Truthout (via flickr
