Israel uses nerve gas on Palestinians:
littleredbutton.com
I lived in the Gaza Strip from January 21 to the end of April, 2001 while making a documentary film. I saw many shocking and surprising things during my time there. By far the most striking and darkly ironic was an incident in February, when the Israeli military used a yet-unidentified gas on civilians living in the Khan Younis refugee camp, adjacent to a large Israeli settlement in southern Gaza.
When I arrived in Khan Younis at mid-day on the 13th of February, Israeli soldiers were firing assault rifles down the main east-west road in the refugee camp, sending men, women and children scattering. A journalist had just sustained a head injury from Israeli live ammunition as our taxi pulled to a halt. My line-producer and I took cover in a narrow alleyway. Palestinian children were scampering past us with their shirts covering their mouths, saying “The gas! They’re shooting the gas!” It was not clear why this was unusual; the Israeli military had often fired tear gas canisters into this part of the Khan Younis refugee camp in the past.
What we were witnessing was the tail-end of a major clash that had broken out the day before in the late afternoon. Apparently, some Palestinian gunmen had taken cover behind a pile of sandbags in the al-Bahar road, known to the locals as the “Tufa barricade,” and begun taking pot-shots at Israeli soldiers in the nearby army post. The Israelis, who have the entire Khan Younis refugee camp ringed about with fortified machine-gun nests, returned fire – heavy machine-gun fire and tank shells -- and didn’t stop returning fire until the next day. The Israeli army later denied firing tank shells into the refugee camp – but I have videotape of the shells detonating on the road that evening. Another thing the Israeli military spokespeople later strenuously denied was that they had used a new kind of gas on the Palestinians that day and during that week. Not tear gas, but a gas that affected the nervous system and caused those who inhaled it to suffer violent convulsions, severe headaches and cramps, and other unpleasant symptoms.
As I made my way through the wards of Amal and Nasser Hospitals that day and for many days afterward, I observed many patients that had been brought to the hospitals suffering from these symptoms. Room after room, women, children, men. Some were vomiting. Some alternated between a coma-like state and violent convulsions, their entire bodies twisting and arching, members of their families struggling to hold them down on the beds. On and on, for days. One boy, who had inhaled a large amount of the gas in question, suffered in the hospital for an entire month with recurrent convulsions. It is difficult to describe the sensation of sitting in a room for hours and days with people suffering so terribly, and knowing that this was done by human beings.
The incident went largely unreported. No articles were written in major US newspapers. Fox News and 60 Minutes did not produce special reports. The story gradually grew old and fell through the cracks. Out of sight and out of mind – and who would believe that the Israeli military would do such a thing to civilians in a refugee camp? Olivier Rafowicz, an Israeli Army spokesman, was furious that I even dared to ask him about the gas when I interviewed him in Tel Aviv on April 10, and he repeated the same angry denials. I did not tell him what I had witnessed and filmed. I make these transcripts available in order to set the record straight. I filmed many other interviews with patients, doctors, etc., but the accounts tend to vary only in the details.
- James Longley, February 2, 2002 |
