Israel Denies Using Depleted Uranium in Gaza, Why does it matter?
January 22nd, 2009
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JERUSALEM, Jan 21 (Reuters) – Israel denied on Wednesday its armed forces used ordnance with depleted uranium during the Gaza Strip offensive, and said that could be proven by any U.N. investigation.
Responding to a letter from Arab envoys, the International Atomic Energy Agency said on Tuesday it would consult with member states on the diplomats’ demand for a probe into whether Israeli attacks on Gaza might have featured the controversial munitions, which can leave dangerous radioactive debris.
“I deny this completely,” Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor said, adding that such allegations were “no more than a recurring motif of anti-Israel propaganda”.
Israel has also been fending off accusations that it unlawfully used white-phosphorous shells, which can cause severe burns, for the 22-day assault on the Palestinian territory.
Depleted uranium is used in weapons because it can penetrate tanks and armour more easily due to its density and other physical properties.
It is a particular health risk around impact sites, where dust can get into people’s lungs and vital organs. It also has civilian uses in medical equipment and is used in radiation shields.
Israel was accused of using depleted uranium during its 2006 offensive against Lebanese Hezbollah guerrillas. Palmor said a U.N. investigation failed to find any evidence of that.
“Should they decide to hassle the U.N. inspectors again, they’ll get the same results,” he said.
The IAEA has in the past contributed to studies on depleted uranium traces from ammunition in the Balkans which found it was highly unlikely that a reported increase in cancer risks there could be linked to the traces. (Writing by Dan Williams; Editing by Alison Williams)
This story has been all over the news recently and in fact there hundreds of stories dealing with the accusations that Israel used depleted uranium in the weapons used in their most recent Gaza offensive. Various Muslim countries are claiming that uranium was used in the weapons, Israel claims that there were no uranium-based munitions, the IAEA says it may investigate, human rights groups are up in arms etc etc.
Personally, I don’t know enough about the recent raid to know whether or not it was justified and whether or not it was carried out within reasonable constraints to avoid undue civillian impact. Israel has been fighting for most of its history to just have some basic safety and lets not forget that the West Bank and Gaza Strip are filled with militants who would not be allowed to continue to exist in any other context period.
I tend to doubt that the weapons used in the most recent skirmish contained uranium. DU tends to be reserved for armor-penitrators because of the unique physical characteristics of the material that make it perfect for cutting through a tank like a hot knife through butter. However, it is possible that a few armor penitrator rounds may have been used or that DU may have been incorporated into the ballast of a bomb or the nose of a projectile, either to add weight or improve penetration capabilities or both. Much as I doubt it, it’s not beyond the relhm of possibility.
So why does it matter? It doesn’t! If Israel was justified in firing a projectile then it was justified in firing a depleted uranium projectile. If it was unjustified, the use of depleted uranium makes it no better or worse. Simply being radioactive and being made into a kind of boogie-man does not actually make a DU round especially dangerous or sinister. However you judge the actions of Israel, it should be consistent whether the rounds were depleted uranium, tungsten, lead, bismuth or a combination thereof.
It’s amazing to see how the Muslim press has going with this though. They’ve been making the uranium thing the big issue, describing how the Israelis are busy pumping uranium into civilian populations and thus killing babies. Of course, the reality is that lies like this only make the situation worse. Not only is it just more propaganda against the infidels, but it’s likely to only worsen the plight of those innocent individuals who were injured. Perhaps if they stopped worrying about the ionizing energy that uranium emits they might take a second to realize that occasionally the kinetic energy that a round carries does cause injury to the wrong people. But no, they’re too busy chasing ghosts to actually consider the value of the truth. This is, after all, the most immoral and filthy religion on the face of the earth. (which is really an achievement given how bad the others are too.)
If the Muslim world actually had a shred of decency they might also consider mentioning that the gorilla fighters and militant forces have a nasty tendency to hide behind schools and hospitals. But no, just shift the blame and obscure the real issue by harping on these silly lies about the dangers of uranium, a common naturally-occurring metal.
This entry was posted on Thursday, January 22nd, 2009 at 9:56 pm and is filed under Bad Science, Depleted Cranium, Obfuscation, Paranormal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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January 22nd, 2009 at 10:32 pm
It’s very unlikely that any DU was used in this action, but it’s the current bogyman, so of course its going to be pulled out after something like this.
Given that the Israeli objective was to cause as much economic damage as posible for punitive as opposed to territorial purposes, it is more likely that much of the ordinance was HT which knocks down buildings more effectively than DU penetrators.
As for the conflict itself, what did Hamas expect? Launching rockets into Israel is the geopolitical equivalent of poking a wasp’s nest with a stick…
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January 23rd, 2009 at 12:36 am
I don’t judge what Israel does becasue no matter what they try including trying to offer compromises and offering more land they get nothing but people trying to terrorize the nation. I guess if this is the only way they can keep themselves from being inundated by suicide bombers and rocket attacks then I guess that’s the way it is.
I don’t see why depleted uranium matters though. So what if the weapons had uranium in them? It’s not any worse than normal.
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January 23rd, 2009 at 3:29 am
You know the missles are ok but the DU might KILL somebody. Sure am glad all those car and nightclubs bombs did not have DU in them. I guess that just shows the Jews are are worster terrorists.
Perhaps they should complain about both sides using WEAPONS ON CIVILIAN TARGETS AT ALL? Seems likes a bigger issue to me.
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January 23rd, 2009 at 7:24 am
An op-ed in the NYT by Muammar Qaddafi (yes, that Muammar Qaddafi) on a solution to the problem, sounding surprisingly statesmanlike. The One-State Solution
Unworkable, (and also ghost written) I suspect, but a nice change from the usual rhetoric of death that one expects from a Muslim leader.
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January 23rd, 2009 at 3:06 pm
Just to make you all jealous, I have some depleted uranium rounds.
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January 23rd, 2009 at 3:11 pm
Magic Donuts said:
Maybe we should consider that these people were driven to this because of Israel’s actions and expansions. As I’ve read online at NYT and KOS if Israel had just obeyed the ceasefire in the summer none of this would have happened.
http://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/7nvd1/cnn_confirms_that_israel_broke_ceasefire_first/
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January 23rd, 2009 at 3:34 pm
Bruce said:
Bruce,
What ceasefire was this, exactly? At what point did Hamas actually stop firing rockets into border towns like Sderot? I’d really be interested in knowing.
Fact: Hamas is always willing to declare a ceasefire, but has not once been willing to actualy abide by one.
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January 23rd, 2009 at 5:10 pm
DV8: That’s what’s great about Col. Qadaffi.
He’s crazy as a loon, always has been, but it’s an amusing and different kind of crazy.
I don’t even think his Islam is more than skin deep – he’s always been some sort of freaky Pan-Africanist (seriously!) personality cult guy; I think Islam is just a necessary fig leaf for ruling Libya.
Bruce: Kos (whichever diarist) is, as usual, wrong. Likewise, the Times. Whenever one looks at actual instances, Israel is serious about ceasefires, and Hamas (or Fatah or Hezbollah, whoever’s involved) isn’t.
As Matthew said, Hamas has never stopped launching rockets – they just slowed down a little, and people like Kos diarists and Times reporters count that as “good enough”, for reasons that are unclear if one is not willing to simply posit bias.
(I, however, am willing to posit it, both to satisfy Ockham’s Razor, and because it’s been so thoroughly exhibited in such detail so often.)
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January 23rd, 2009 at 6:36 pm
Bruce said:
I think you need to think of the real context of this. How were they “driven” or “forced” to do this? They were attacked and therefore they attacked back? is that the idea?
That doesn’t make much sense because you have to consider that they used some primitive rockets that they knew could not ever destroy Israel. Their rockets might, at most, kill a few civilians. It is hardly a good stratigic attack. They also knew it would cause a response by Israel.
So why do they send rockets at israel even knowing it will do little but cause retaliation? I think that is the question and the answer is simple: there is a faction of the population, Hamas and so on, who simply want war. They are driven by hatred and spite and they actually want to be attacked. Yes, they want attack. They want it because they want to get others angry and hope an attack will do that. They want conflict. They might even want to die as martyr to Allah, but really they just believe Israel must be opposed.
For these people the biggest threat is that tensions will die down. This is why they stoke the fire whenever they think it might go cold.
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January 23rd, 2009 at 7:16 pm
100 % percent behind Israel. DU or not.
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January 23rd, 2009 at 7:31 pm
LanguageGeek said:
See what you need is a half dozen AC-130H Spectre gunships to fly up and down the Strip continuously for several days, giving the area a good hosing down. Problem solved. Right there LanguageGeek [/sarcasim]
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January 23rd, 2009 at 8:16 pm
Israel’s use of bulldozers as a tactical theatre weapon within refugee camps is much more troubling than any moot use of DU.
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January 23rd, 2009 at 8:59 pm
The McGlashan said:
I tend to agree, because it is it is an outright push to pauperize these people with the objective of driving them into exile. It’s one thing to punish a community for harboring enemy elements and giving them succor, it’s another thing all together to use this as an excuse for cultural genocide.
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January 23rd, 2009 at 9:55 pm
DV82XL said:
Well said. Israel engages in war crimes and should be held accountable.
I think I know what you are talking about and that refugee camp was bulldozed after a number of Palestinians resisting Israel’s actions retreated there and stored some supplies, so the Israelis bulldozed the entire camp. Typical that Israel uses the actions of a few to oppress the Palestinian people as a whole.
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January 23rd, 2009 at 10:16 pm
The McGlashan said:
Welcome to democratic warfare.
These people voted massively for a group whose stated intent was to attack Israel and kill as many Jews as possible (whether inside Israel or elsewhere – see Hamas charter and public statements). They gave Hamas a mandate to do this, which makes them just as responsible as Hamas itself. They’re getting *exactly* what they voted for. If they didn’t want this, they should have voted for someone who was actually interested in stopping the rockets and suicide attacks, and wasn’t despicable enough to put rocket launchers in schoolyards and on hospital roofs.
What, pray tell, did they think was going to happen when they backed a group whose stated goal was to attack their much larger, far more capable neighbour (with the primary tactics of suicide bombs on city buses and in cafes, and ~200 random rocket attacks/week into towns)?
Israel has been trying very hard for the last few decades to find an answer that does not involve killing every living thing in Gaza (they even tried giving it back to Egypt once – Egypt wisely refused), but if they ever decide that there is no way to stop attacks on their citizens without doing it, then it will be done, probably within a few days.
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January 23rd, 2009 at 11:02 pm
Matthew said:
This is not democratic warfare, it’s not religious warfare, although it is convenient to call it so. It’s a battle between two systems. The first is a modern forward-looking one that embraces the future, and the other a backwards-looking one clinging to the past. The Qadaffi article was right in at least one thing: there are more than one million Muslim Arabs in Israel; they possess Israeli nationality and take part in political life with the Jews, forming political parties. These people understand that holding on to a past that was in many ways worse than the present is just stupid.
There has to come a point in any conflict where one of the parties must face the fact that they have arrived at a point where they cannot win and must surrender. Palestinian forces cannot win, the only thing they can do is sue for peace even if it is on Israel’s terms, because that is the only way they can get any real international support and any real hope of seeing real pressure put on Israel to cut them a good deal.
Sadly this is their only hope.
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January 25th, 2009 at 2:59 pm
Bruce said:
I think you’re wasting your time Bruce.
You’ll never get committed Zionists to change their minds, as the ideology of Zionism is sustained by the paranoid sense of victimhood which was engendered in Jews by the Holocaust. Zionists are utterly convinced that if they ever lose control, the Palestinians will exterminate them.
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January 25th, 2009 at 3:25 pm
George Carty said:
What exactly is a “Zionist” someone who thinks that they have the right not to be killed or live in constant fear of their life just because they live in a country in the middle east that is smaller than the state of New Jersey, composed mostly of desert and never really was ‘taken’ from anyone?
As DV8 mentions, as an arab, a Muslim, you can live in Israel. There are laws in Israel which prevent you from being discriminated against. You can hold an Israeli citizenship. Beyond that, you’re more free in many ways as an arab living in Israel than you’d be living in other middle eastern countries.
Israel was not seized or taken to make it a “Zionist” homeland. There were jews living there, who had been moving there, for some time before the modern state was created. The whole area was european imperial ruled for a long time. Most of the area that was ruled by europe was basically handed to local arabic control. Only a tiny sliver of poor land was given to basically Jewish control. Arabs were not forced to leave. Many stayed and are still there.
What do you think this caused? As soon as the country was created it was attacked by nearly all of its neighbors.
It barely survived. Since then it has engaged in preemptive strikes against the neighboring states which had already sworn they would destroy it. (How dare they?) The state of israel spends more each year per capita than any other nation in the world on security and national defense. It’s probably the only reason they’ve survived repeated attacks by the local Islamic republics, including in 1973 and more recent attacks by Syria and Iraq.
What they hell do you want from them? To abandon their country on the grounds that others want them to? Or on the grounds of some kind of misunderstanding of history? The land belonged to local Assyrians at one point, but before the modern state it was ruled by (mostly) the British, but also the French ruled parts of it. Before the British it was ruled by Ottoman Empire. Before the Ottomans it was ruled by the any number of groups: The Jews, the Assyrians, the Romans, the Greeks, take your pick.
There has been plenty of opportunity to try to provide some kind of peaceful coexistence with those who demand that they live separately in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. There have been repeated attempts to offer compensation to move or to provide for local civil leadership. “Land for peace” and expanded rights have been tried. They’ve been at this since the 1970’s. Despite this, only building a wall around these areas seems to do anything to stop constant violence. They open the door and try to allow for more civil secular relations and what happens? People repeatedly blow themselves up in buses and markets.
What is your contention, George? That the modern state of Israel, complete with a secular justice system and national assembly and with the garenteed rights for all people of any religion to live there has no legitimate reason to expect they should be able to have some kind of security? They can’t just have a country because they don’t submit to strict Islamic rule? That’s so horrible, huh?
If you honestly think that the whole country is ruled by “Zionism” that is going to force everyone but the jews out and is a militant effort to exterminate everyone else, why not go there and see if they’ll let you in. You can do that, you know. If you really want, regardless of your religion, you can get a visa and go there. Then you can apply for an extension to live there and then you can apply for citizenship. And you can get it, complete with everything you’d never find in any other Middle Eastern country: the right to obey or disobey religions laws, like eating pork by the light of a flame on the Sabbath. You get freedom to peaceably assemble, protection from discrimination, the right to trial by jury, the whole damn package.
But apparently the Jews should all leave and the land should go become part of the Syrian kind of rule. Who’s being so discriminatory?
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January 27th, 2009 at 9:50 am
Doc,
You seem to be conflating ’strict Islamic rule’ with ‘the Syrian kind of rule’. Syria’s regime is Baathist, secular and sort-of Stalinist. Distasteful to some, yes, but not Islamist by any stretch of the imagination.
You also gloss over some of the more distasteful periods during the establishment of Israel. According to 50 year old documents released by the International Committee of the Red Cross in 1998, under the orders of Ben Gurion, Acre aqueduct was poisoned with typhoid. The purpose, according to Gurion’s own diaries, was genocide, and if not complete, the purpose was not to allow the dispossessed Palestinians to return to their homes.
Gurion’s forces also bombed and sniped at British Mandate forces as they attempted to protect existing Palestinian residents property.
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May 24th, 2009 at 3:13 am
DEPLETED URANIUM IS A CRIME. THe US has sold it all over the world and shot it all over the world. Now it is used in the british army and also israel, france, korea even japan, which suffered the terrorism of americas first nuclear weapon now has forgotten the crime and is using it themselves.
DEPLETED URANIUM IS NOT GENOCIDE IT IS OMNICIDE BECAUSE IT KILLS OUR SOLDIERS AND THEIR PEOPLE ALIKE. IT WILL COME TO HAUNT US YOU CANT DO THIS TO THE WORLD AND NOT HAVE IT COME BACk
DEPLETED URANIUM IS NOT FOUND IN THE EARTH EXCEPT FOR WHERE WE PUT IT AND NOW IT IS EVERYWHERE AND CANT BE ESCAPED. DANGEROUS FOR FIVE BILLION YEARS MAY AS WELL BE FOREVER
WE ARE ****ED. THE DUST IS ALL OVER THE WORLDS AIR NOW. SURELY CANCER WILL BE EPIDEMIC AND BIRTH DEFECTS AND MANY OTHER HORRIBLE CRIMES WE CAUSE AGAINST OTHERS AND OURSELVES!
IT IS OUR UNDOING!
WE USED THIS NUCLEAR WEAPON THINKING WE COULD KILL AWAY ALL THE BROWN PEOPLE AND THE ONES THAT WE THINK ARE INFERIOR AND NOW LOOK WAHT! IT COMES AND GETS US TOO! SERVES US RIGHT!
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May 24th, 2009 at 3:27 am
UraniumIsMurder said:
You know shouting a stream of baldly inaccurate statements doesn’t make them more credible.
For example: depleted uranium is no different than natural uranium, except that the MORE radioactive component has been removed, thus making it LESS radioactive than the naturally occurring type. It is not particularly dangerous now and it will not get any worse.
It is not a nuclear weapon, but a kinetic one depending on its mass, not fission or fusion to work.
The truth is that it is not used that regularly at all and only where its appropriate, and it doesn’t turn into a light dust, but an oxide that is relativity stable, and not particularly bio-avalable.
You really should find other sources to get your information from, the ones you are using cannot prove any of their contentions and are categorically wrong.
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May 24th, 2009 at 5:18 am
I don’t even understand WHY Israelis would use depleted uranium in Gaza. AFAIK Hamas doesn’t have any armoured vehicles (the targets that DU ammo is made for).
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May 24th, 2009 at 5:55 am
George Carty said:
Which is a good reason why they didn’t use DU rounds, or if they did in very limited quantities. Politicians, propagandists, and activists have intoxicated each other with extremely misleading and unsubstantiated claims about the use of DU munitions, radicalizing the issue in a way that has had a chilling effect upon serious analysis. For once I would like to see soil samples, taken by a neutral party from these ‘contaminated’ areas put through a proper assay by a third-party lab. I would also like to see a proper radiological survey done with sealed calibrated instruments on suspected areas.
Some have been done by various media outlets, but guess what? They found nothing. But those stories don’t get repeated over, and over, like the dead baby lies do. The scientific debate is now bogged down in a mire because many of the statements made by extremists have become a muddled mixture of unverifiable statements, speculative assertions, and politically motivated falsehoods. In conditions like these good science doesn’t stand a chance.
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May 24th, 2009 at 6:43 am
UraniumIsMurder said:
It’s not found on earth naturally yet, but if you wait long enough the natural uranium deposits will have enough of the shorter lived U-235 decay away top make them equivelent to depleted uranium. That is a strawman though because uranium-238 is found on earth and there is plenty of it, even if the isotope is not usually found on its own, it is less radioactive anyway. Depleted uranium is basically the same as natural uranium except a little less radioactive.
Uranium is abundant. You find it in soil. You find it in rock. You find it in sea water. Therefore, terrestrial dust has uranium dust in it, just like it has iron dust and aluminum dust. (oxides, that is, not the metal usually).
It was shown here that the single largest contribution humans have to uranium being added to the earths atmosphere and beind mobelized is coal burning.
Uranium is used as a projectile material for a simple reason, it cuts through armor like a hot knife through butter. It is not used much for anything else because it is more expensive to fabricate than other materials and it does not have much benefit when up against armor.
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