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.
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