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Home→Israel/Judaism - General→Israel in Lebanon: Report of the Intern'l Commiss.→Appendix V, Part 2: Evidence re. Israeli conduct of the war    

Appendix V, Part 2: Evidence re. Israeli conduct of the war

Aldeilis (EN) Posted on 12. August 2005 by

Appendix V: Selected testimony and reports

Part 2: Evidence relating to Israeli conduct of the war in Lebanon

Troy Rusli, Norwegian, is a surgeon who worked in Lahout Field Hospital from 15 July to the end of August. He was interviewed by the Commission on 4 October 1982 at the Gaza Hospital in Beirut.

Commission: Have you as a doctor come across any wounds, caused by weapons which are banned by International Law?

Dr Rusli: We can divide the weapons used into five types. The first weapon is the concussion bomb which can destroy a whole eight storey building until it’s flat. I understand from a military expert that this bomb will explode in three stages. It penetrates the top floors, then explode two or three floors down and then explode again lower. The second weapon is what they call phosphorus shell bombs. Actually it is better to say a rocket, because it is not a bomb. Phosphorus shell rockets are usually used as a marker or target, it is not allowed to be used on civilian places. But, in this situation, in the city it is difficult to divide a civilian mark [target] from a military mark. So there are some civilian casualties from these phosphorus rockets. The third weapon, we call it a cluster bomb. A big canister, which consists of about 200 or 300 bomblets, small bombs. It’s exploded about 50 meters above the earth so that then the small bomb will come out and then explode again. Again, this cluster bomb should be used only to hit, like, a Panzer wagon, a tank, but again in the city it’s difficult to define whether it’s a military or civilian target. And some of the – a lot, not some, a lot of the people has been hit by these cluster bombs, we have proof of this. And some of the small bomb lets doesn’t explode at all. And they lay around; children can pick it up and then explode it, and then a lot of them have to be amputated, legs or arms. Or we find shrapnel inside the stomach, we have to open it and remove it.

The fourth type of weapons that has been used is high explosive bombs. I don’t know if that is allowed under the Geneva Convention or not, but it cause a lot of casualties. In one day we had eighty persons living in a cellar, and this type of bomb exploded in the cellar, I believe thirty persons were directly killed from these bombs, and fifty were injured, burn injuries, and 22 of these come to our hospital. From these 22, five die. They have about second and third degree burn injuries.

And the fifth that is recognised by Geneva Convention is what we call high velocity weapon. Like for example, Kalashnikov AK-47, or M-16, this bullet have a different effect to a normal pistol, because this bullet if it hit the body makes a vacuum mechanism and they explode inside the bodies, and you see total destruction of the soft tissues and the bones; what is left is more or less like porridge.

Concerning the patient, for me, whether it is from phosphorus shells or from high explosive bombs, or this high velocity weapon, the patient have to be amputated anyway, so I believe all five weapons are very dangerous to be used on civilians.

Q: You have given us this list of banned weapons. Can you tell us, with the patients you’ve treated personally, which kind of wounds did you come across?

Rusli: We have treated two patients who I am clinically sure have phosphorus bomb injuries. We have got fifty patients with high explosive burn injuries, and many of the rest have this kind of high velocity weapon injury. These very often end with amputation; the rate of amputation in our hospital is between fifteen and twenty per cent.

Q: You have seen people burnt allegedly with phosphorus?

Rusli: Yes we have, clinically speaking. Phosphorus is very difficult to detect. . . I try to take some sample to the American University Hospital, but they cannot say that it is phosphorus or not. So when I say clinically, I mean we found shrapnel inside the body still burning and smoking. We have two patients like this; one, which is an old man, have smoke coming through the breath, through his lungs.    

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Auden Tommesen, presently a resident surgeon in a hospital in Norway, who worked as a surgeon at the Lahout Field Hospital between 25 July and 5 August 1982, interviewed by the Commission in Oslo some 3 or 4 weeks after Dr Rusli (30 October), also mentioned these two particular patients:


Auden Tommesen: I would like to give two case descriptions of patients with chemical burns; the suspected causative agent is a thermal chemical artillery grenade. On Monday 2 August in the morning we. received a 20-year-old patient, male, in an unconscious state, with normal cardial and neurological findings. According to ambulance personnel he was a casualty of the day before and he had been treated in an emergency centre down town before admission to Lahout. His only obvious lesions were multiple, about 15 to 20 round craters in the skin, ranging from a few millimetres to about 7 to 8 centimetres in diameter. They were distributed on the right side of the body, leg, right trunk, right arm, right side of the neck and the head. The lesions consisted in chemical burns, with coagulation necrosis of the tissues in and immediately around the lesions. In the craters were found small greyish particles, in an amount of about, let’s say, half a teaspoon in a crater of about 6 centimetres in diameter. The particles were later submitted to chemical analysis.

Commission: Where?

Tommesen: In Norway, in a laboratory. Later the same day we received a recently injured 60-year-old man, civilian, Palestinian, living in one of the refugee camps. Before admission to Lahout he had been padded and bandaged in an emergency centre down town. Only a belt around the mid

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