Israel's 'tungsten bombs'

Independent on Sunday:

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Erik Fosse, a Norwegian doctor who has worked in Gaza hospitals during the conflict, told The Independent on Sunday yesterday that Israel was using so-called Dime bombs designed to produce an intense explosion in a small space. The bombs are packed with tungsten powder, which has the effect of shrapnel but often dissolves in human tissue, making it difficult to discover the cause of injuries.

Dr Fosse said he had seen a number of patients with extensive injuries to the lower part of the body. "It was as if they had stepped on a mine, but there was no shrapnel in the wounds," he said. "Some had lost their legs. It looked as though they had been sliced off. I have been to war zones for 30 years, but I have never seen such injuries before." However, the injuries matched photographs and descriptions in medical literature of the effects of Dime bombs; the acronym stands for dense inert metal explosive.

"All the patients I saw had been hit by bombs fired from unmanned drones," said Dr Fosse, head of the Norwegian Aid Committee. "The bomb hit the ground near them and exploded." His colleague, Mads Gilbert, accused Israel of using the territory as a testing ground for a new, "extremely nasty" type of explosive. "This is a new generation of small explosive that detonates with extreme power and dissipates its power within a range of five to 10 metres," he said.

According to military databases, Dime bombs are intended for use where conventional weapons might kill or injure bystanders – to kill combatants in a house, for example, without harming people next door. Instead of being made from metal, which sprays shrapnel across a wide area, the casing is carbon fibre. Part of the motive for developing the bombs was to replace the use of depleted uranium, but Dr Fosse said the cancer risk from the use of tungsten powder was well known. "These patients should be followed up to see if there are any carcinogenic effects," he said.

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The fact is that shrapnel bombs would produce injuries that would be as devastating or worse. This appears to be one of those scary weapons stories that come out of the UK media after any conflict. We saw similar stories after the enemy was driven out of Falujah. The fact is that the story is griping about weapons that limited injury to a smaller area. The story makes no mention of the weapons used by Hamas to deliberately fire on Israeli noncombatants which triggered the war. If Hams had stopped those war crimes, there never would have been anyne killed or injured in Gaza by Israel.