With apologies to Talking Heads.

The Israeli Defense Force is using white phosphorus on built up areas in Gaza. They've denied it, sort of, by saying only that Israel is using "munitions that are allowed for under international law". Israel isn't a signatory to key arms control treaties, upheld by most of the rest of the world, which govern the use of WP and other chemical weapons. So those treaties can be ignored in favor of long-planned PR spin. Both the US and Israel claim that using WP as a smokescreen generator isn't prohibited by any treaties and they're correct - as long as the WP isn't being employed over built up areas, at which time the indiscriminate nature and incendiary anti-personnel effects of these airbursts make them illegal by the Geneva Conventions governing responsibilities towards civilian non-combatants and by article two, protocol III of the 1980 UN Convention on Certain Weapons. That is, a war crime.

That distinction came up in Fallujah, Iraq during 2004 when US forces initially said they were using white phosphorus only as a smokescreen, later on admitting reluctantly that it had also been used as an anti-personnel weapon on insurgents. The US military never officially admitted to using WP on civilian areas, however, despite numerous reports of second and third degree chemical burns consistent with WP use.

Incandescent particles of WP cast off by a WP weapon's initial explosion can produce extensive, deep (second and third degree), burns. Phosphorus burns carry a greater risk of mortality than other forms of burns due to the absorption of phosphorus into the body through the burned area, resulting in liver, heart and kidney damage, and in some cases multi-organ failure.[26] These weapons are particularly dangerous to exposed people because white phosphorus continues to burn unless deprived of oxygen or until it is completely consumed.

Earlier, the Bush administration had no problem with saying that Saddam's use of WP on civilian areas had been an atrocity, a war crime. Somehow I doubt they'll say the same about Israel.

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