My conclusions about Israel's actions in Lebanon square with at least one IDF commander's assessment:
"What we did was
insane and monstrous, we covered entire towns in cluster bombs," the
head of an IDF rocket unit in Lebanon said regarding the use of cluster
bombs and phosphorous shells during the war.
Quoting
his battalion commander, the rocket unit head stated that the IDF fired
around 1,800 cluster bombs, containing over 1.2 million cluster
bomblets.
In
addition, soldiers in IDF artillery units testified that the army used
phosphorous shells during the war, widely forbidden by international
law. According to their claims, the vast majority of said explosive
ordinance was fired in the final 10 days of the war.
The
rocket unit commander stated that Multiple Launch Rocket System (MLRS)
platforms were heavily used in spite of the fact that they were known
to be highly inaccurate.
And also the feelings of one reservist with a conscience:
S.is a reservist in
an artillery battalion, and he is not at ease with what he did during
the second Lebanon war. [...]
"Tell me, how do the villages there look? Are they all destroyed?" S.
asked me after I told him that I was in contact with UN personnel who
were patrolling the villages. What really made something inside S. snap
was when his battalion was given an entire village as a target one
night. He thinks it was Taibeh, a village in what is called the eastern
sector, but he's not sure. The battalion commander assembled the men
and told them that the whole village had been divided into parts and
that each team was supposed to "flood" its alloted space - without
specific targets, simply to bombard the village.
"I told myself that
the people left in that village must be the weaker ones, like in
Haifa," says S. "I felt that we were acting like Hezbollah. Taking
houses and turning them into targets. That's terror. My soul is
important to me. When I hug my girlfriend, I want to feel good about
myself. And I don't feel good about what I did in the war. I felt like
I really should have tossed my weapon and run away."
If only he (and others) had done just that. Even so, as always, it's encouraging to hear voices like this coming from within Israel--in this case from within the Israeli military itself.
This same story says:
Another peculiarity
involves the type of shells that were used. The 155-mm. artillery
batteries use two types: American-made shells, known in the IDF by the
acronym matzrash, and Israeli-made shells, called tze'if. Y. [a reservist in the same battalion] learned
that with the Israeli cluster shells, the percentage of duds - i.e., of
bombs that essentially became land mines - was lower than that of the
American-made ones, and yet they fired only the latter kind.
When I first read about the high rate of duds noted by the UN (around 40%), I wondered if this might not have been part of a conscious strategy by the Israelis to use munitions with a known higher dud rate in order to leave behind more unexploded bomblets for the returning civilian population. These stories don't leave much doubt.
So the Israeli military massively ramped up its use of cluster munitions in the last three days of their assault on Lebanon, blanketed entire towns, and consciously chose to use munitions that would represent the maximum amount of danger and destruction to the returning population--mainly children, as I've noted. "The most moral army in the world"? No, more like a strong contender for the opposite title.
