Senior UN officials and Human Rights watchdog groups are calling for Israeli leaders to be brought up on war crimes charges, alleging that the IDF’s use of M825 Felt-Wedge projectiles violates international protocols restricting conventional weapons use in densely populated areas. The problem in the UN’s argument, as with most of the arguments against Israel’s use of force in Gaza, is that it rewrites international treaties on warfare to better fit an anti-Israel narrative. White Phosphorous — or ‘Willy Pete’ — has been used for decades to create large smokescreens for troop cover and target illumination and is not — despite any claim to the contrary — an incendiary weapon (nor is it proscribed under any law on armed conflict). Article one of the treaty banning incendiaries says as much:
That’s not to say Willy Pete is without collateral effects. There have been several documented cases where WP has injured or killed civilians, as the illuminant burns slowly at extremely high temperatures. But like with other legal conventional munitions such as artillery shells and guided bombs, the responsibility for incidental death and damage lies with Hamas and any other combatant which uses human shields to mask its operations. International war crime statutes were written to prosecute those who fill mass graves with the bodies of noncombatants, the Hitlers and the Milosevics, not those who use legal illuminants in small, localized conflict. If a treatise on armed conflict can no longer differentiate between the use of military smoke shells and deliberate rocket attacks on civilian populations, the effect is to doom such treaties to irrelevance. Naturally, the media is doing its part to maximize confusion and obscure the truth. One particularly egregious example comes in this Los Angeles Times report on the subject in which WP is called a ‘gas’ and never even identified as a smoke device.
