Israel using chemical weapons: doctors

Israel using chemical weapons: doctors - Breaking News - World - Breaking News

July 27, 2006 - 6:39AM
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Lebanon is investigating reports from doctors that Israel has used weapons in its 15-day-old bombardment of southern Lebanon that have caused wounds they have never seen before.
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Blackened bodies have been showing up at hospitals in southern
Lebanon two weeks into the war between Israel and Hizbollah guerrillas
that has seen at least 418 people, mostly civilians, killed in Lebanon
and at least 42 Israelis.

Killed by Israeli air raids, the
Lebanese dead are charred in a way local doctors, who have lived
through years of civil war and Israeli occupation, say they have not
seen before.

Bachir Cham, a Belgian-Lebanese doctor at the
Southern Medical Centre in Sidon, received eight bodies after an
Israeli air raid on nearby Rmeili which he said exhibited such wounds.

He has taken 24 samples from the bodies to test what killed them. He believes it is a chemical.

Cham
said the bodies of some victims were "black as shoes, so they are
definitely using chemical weapons. They are all black but their hair
and skin is intact so they are not really burnt. It is something else."

"If
you burnt someone with petrol their hair would burn and their skin
would burn down to the bone. The Israelis are 100 per cent using
chemical weapons."

Lebanese President Emile Lahoud has repeatedly accused Israel of using phosphorus bombs in its offensive.

Human
Rights Watch, which has accused the Israeli army of using cluster bombs
in populated areas of southern Lebanon, said it had not verified claims
that Israel had used phosphorus.

"We are investigating but we
haven't confirmed anything yet. We have seen phosphorus used before and
we have seen it in the artillery stocks of the Israeli army in the
north," said Peter Bouckaert, emergencies director at Human Rights
Watch.

"Phosphorus shells do have a legitimate use in
illuminating the battlefield at night. The offensive use of phosphorus
would be a violation of international conventions."

Television
footage shows some bodies, such as those of 20 civilians killed when an
Israeli missile hit the van in which they were fleeing the border
village of Marwaheen, blackened in the way Cham describes. No one knows
what killed them.

"We are seeing abnormal burns, different from
wars we've seen in the past. The corpses of these victims are shrinking
to half their normal size. You think it is the corpse of a child at
first but it turns out to be a grown man," said Raed Salman Zeinedine,
director of Tyre Government Hospital.

"We've never seen anything like it but what the causes are I don't want to speculate. We have no scientific answer."