UN investigates Israel's 'uranium weapons'

The UN is sending twenty experts to look into claims that Israel used a new kind of uranium based weapon during the war in Lebanon.

As I reported here and here many questions have been raised regarding uranium samples taken from the site.

Butros al-Harb, Unep's Middle East director, told a Lebanese radio interviewer at the weekend: "If uranium was used, we will find out and we will announce it. We cannot confirm anything now, but we will wait for results."

Israel have since issued their most explicit denial yet:

Major Avital Leibovitz, a spokeswoman for the Israel Defence Forces, said: "We deny using any weapons containing uranium." One official suggested that if the environmentalists had indeed found traces of uranium, they would have to look for a different explanation.

It has been reported that "two soil samples thrown up by Israeli bombs in the south Lebanese villages of Khiam and At Tiri, centres of fierce fighting between Israel and Hizbollah, showed "elevated radiation signatures"."

What is unclear is what kind of bomb could have been used to produce the levels of radiation found.

Mark Regev, the Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman, went as far as to hint that anti-Semitism was afoot:

"The sort of munitions we used in the Lebanon campaign," he said, "were almost identical to the sort of weaponry used in conflicts over the past decade by Nato countries, by Western countries. Sometimes there's a feeling that the Jewish state is being singled out for special treatment. One really has to ask why it is that the finger is being pointed at Israel."

The great thing about science is that it will provide an answer that transcends any bias anyone may have. It will simply tell us what kind of weapon was used.

Avital Leibovitz may already be preparing us to look for "a different explanation" and Mark Regev might already be implying that the UN is anti-Semitic, but the truth is that science will provide us with an inarguable result.

But what puzzles me is, what does Regev mean when he says that the weapons used were "almost" identical?

Time will tell.

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tag: Israel, Lebanon, UN, uranium, based, weapons