JABALYA REFUGEE CAMP (Gaza Strip) Feb 3: Israeli human rights activists on Monday condemned the army’s continued use of dart-spraying “flechette” shells in a Palestinian revolt after two youths underwent complicated surgery for liver wounds.
Israeli military sources said a tank on Friday fired three flechette rounds toward what an army outpost in the Gaza Strip identified as “a group of terrorists” about to fire homemade Qassam missiles into nearby Israel.
Palestinians said the area was on the edge of the sprawling Jabalya refugee camp and the flechettes hit a group of young Palestinians playing volleyball, not Palestinian militants.
Nine lightly injured youths were released from Jabalya’s al-Awda hospital on Monday ,but the two who took flechettes in their livers had to undergo emergency surgery and will remain in hospital indefinitely, hospital director Fadel Jouda said.
“We stopped the bleeding but there’s no way to get them out,” he said of the arrow-shaped darts inside Islam Sabbah, 12, and Bilal al-Arini, 17, who were in stable condition.
“Islam is lucky to be alive. He arrived in hospital with a serious injury and was bleeding heavily,” Jouda said.
He showed two four-centimetre-long darts he said had been extracted from the bodies of several of the youths.
Israeli human rights group B’tselem said use of flechettes were a violation of international law if the casualties were in an inhabited area and uninvolved in combat, but otherwise was not generally banned by international law.
“(In this case) flechettes became a indiscriminatory weapon and that is unlawful,” B’tselem spokesman Lior Yavne said.
DENSELY POPULATED REGION: Jabalya is a one-kilometre-square camp packed with around 90,000 Palestinians. The narrow Gaza Strip has eight refugee camps and is one of the world’s most densely populated regions.
Yavne said B’tselem, which monitors territories captured by Israel in the 1967 Middle East war and wracked by a Palestinian militant uprising since 2000, said it had frequently protested against the army’s firing of flechettes but to no avail.
Israeli military sources said the army’s use of flechettes in the conflict had been legal as targeted areas were not residential, although militants firing Qassams often used built-up communities as cover.
B’tselem’s website said at least nine Gaza residents had been killed by Israeli army flechettes between March 2001 and February 2002. Palestinian medics said the toll consisted of four women, two mentally-ill men — one of whom was apparently trying to infiltrate a Jewish settlement — and three minors.
B’tselem said a flechette round explodes in the air and flings thousands of small metal darts as far away as 300 metres in all directions.
The Israeli army made considerable use of flechette shells during its 1978-2000 occupation of southern Lebanon.
Arini, one of the hospitalized youths, said the flechettes rained in as he and other boys were warming up to play volleyball in a makeshift playground just east of Jabalya.
“We heard three explosions and almost all of us were wounded,” he said, barely able to gasp out his words.
Several flechettes hit a nearby three-storey apartment house inhabited by more than 40 people. Resident Reyad Okal said one was found on his nephew’s bed.
“Thank God no one was hurt but children remained in fear since the incident,” he said, but now he had to sleep with them together in one room to calm them down. “They are scared this might happen again, and who knows?”—Reuters
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