On July 17^th, the fourth day of the Israeli attack on Lebanon, a family was escaping on a minibus from the latest war that was devastating the land of cedars in the summer of 2006, the sixth war since 1967.

 

The millionth bomb. After 34 days and 590 Israeli raids that will leave 1,100,000 unexploded bombs, 700 thousand people flee from the south of Lebanon. 200 thousand will not return to their homes again because they no longer have one. One thousand dead civilians will never return again.

Among these are the victims of the bombing of Sidon on the 17^th July. Eleven Sunnite Lebanese between 5 and 50 years of age were killed by the missile that was launched by an Israeli fighter plane to destroy the bridge of Ruhmeile, ten kilometres north of the Phoenician port.

The wrong moment to cross the bridge for the Zubahir family on its van and for two other cars. Eleven people will find there a speedy but savage death, permitted by international conventions on war weapons, but unworthy of any human being. The photographs that you find in the linked Photographic Gallery were taken in Dr. Bashir Cham’s hospital, the “Complexe Cardiologique Sud Liban”, where the bodies were taken.

 

Blackened skin in 11 vials. On 25^th July Martin Glasenapp, a volunteer from the German ong “Medico International”, Nobel Prize in 1997 for a campaign against mines, lands at the airport in Frankfurt. He carries 11 vials, containing samples of blackened skin in formalin. They are destined to the forensic medicine laboratory of the “Johann Wolfgang Goethe” University. The doctors who open them the following day will find them ordered according to a macabre but efficient scheme: for each, the date of death and a name: the person the mangled body belonged to.

Mohamad, 20 years old, died 17-7-06. Kifah, 30 years old, died 17^th July.

Ibtisam, 50 years old, died 17^th July. Abdalah, 40 years old, died 17-7. Darine, 5 years old, died 17.07. Ibrahim, 13 years old, died 17.07. Moussa, 16 years old, died 17.07.

 

Seventeen samples of skin which were taken from bodies which were whole and without visible burn marks, except for the presence of a black substance which penetrated to a depth of 8 millimetres, as far as the subcutaneous fat. According to the German doctors, the samples of skin taken from their heads “showed hair that was quite intact”.

 

The gentle doctor. Doctor Cham’s clinic is modern and efficient. Bashir Cham looks gentle and moves busily, like someone who has no time to waste. He guides us hurriedly, with no concern for showing his prize structure. With a French degree, specialization and passport in his pocket, he decided some years ago to serve Hippocrate’s oath in his Country. In 2004 he founded the biggest centre for heart surgery in Lebanon. But he fitted it out as a war hospital too, with underground operating rooms. “So we were caught. From the start of the conflict they brought us bodies every day. On the other hand I had created a modern Morgue because the thought of the dead abandoned, like in the previous wars,  in refrigerator cells that were turned off, obsessed me”. Cham states the facts like a technician delivers a report: “That day, those bodies arrived, and they looked like no corpse I had ever seen before”.

 

Deaths never seen before. “The bodies of those that are hit by shell shot usually look like a tartare of human flesh: a pile of bones and bloody pulp. Most of the 25 who died in Saida (in Arabian) in the first three days of the war were like that” he recites in a type of French that recalls the cynicism of doctor Ferdinand Destouches, better known as Cèline. “The oddity of these bodies induced me to have them photographed: extensive portions of the body were black, but not burned. The clothes, hairs and hair were intact. There was also not one drop of blood left in the body… It was certainly not a grenade that had hit them. They showed the same symptoms: the blood had flowed copiously from nose and ears, the blackened skin reminded me of a photograph that I had seen on the first day of the war: a completely black child, with hair intact”.

 

A bomb had also left other blackened but not burned bodies on the field at Marwahine, near the southern border, on 16^th July. “As though they had been exposed to a flash” Cham remembers. Which excludes death by shell.

 

Phosphorus, methane, or… The doubt was spontaneous: maybe T’sahal was using white phosphorus devices, like the USA did at Falluja, in Iraq, the previous year. The doctor ordered the samples to be taken, so that they might be subjected to chemical and pathological analysis in Beirut. A week later Martin Glasenapp from Medico International arrived in Sidon and offered to carry the samples of skin to Frankfurt to determine whether white phosphorus or toxins had been used.

Cham receives the results of the tests from the “Goethe” University on 19^th August.

The experts under the coordination of Professor H. Bratzke gave their expert opinion: they categorically excluded that phosphorus had been used. The skin “shows no burn marks”, not even superficial. Also, the tissues do not show “the specific changes” of those who are exposed to the toxins of a biological attack. The derm and the subcutaneous fat show no sign of necrosis, as they would have if they had been exposed to toxins, but the substance that blackened the skin penetrated for 0,8 millimetres, in some cases concentrating into crystals. “I made a mistake - doctor Cham admits – in sending only samples of skin. I did not take samples of blood, nor did I intubate the bodies for the gastric juices; so in Germany they were unable to determine the cause of death”.

 

Racked arteries.. For weeks Cham wondered about the mysterious substance used by the Israelis in their bombs, when an Egyptian reporter from the Reuters agency, who had heard of the photographs, remembered having seen identical bodies after an attack of the Israeli aviation in Gaza the year before: “blackened but not burned bodies, dripping blood from ears and nose”. In those days, the news of the last attack on the south of Beirut spoke of 60 dead and 60 wounded. The figures strike doctor Cham: no bomb up to now had given such percentages. Usually the proportion between dead and wounded is one to three, or greater. These armaments are very precise and deadly. He consults colleagues from the hospitals of Tyre, Baalbek, South Beirut and Nabatiyeh in the south of Lebanon; Cham gets told in identical manner of the odd symptoms: no burn marks, blood in profusion, dried out bodies.

 

The heart surgeon is invited by the NBC to a television debate together with an Egyptian military expert, with whom he finds the answer to his doubts: “Israelis have boosted the bombs that the US aviation provides them with, adding Methane and Acetylene, two elements that are usually used to solder metals –is his conclusion – their reaction causes temperatures of 1300 degrees and most importantly, by burning the oxygen in the surrounding environment, it creates a devastating impact, to the extent that it makes the internal organs of the victims explode; the blood draining from the bodies comes from the racked aortas of the victims.

 

Cham also remembers well “the brains of the bodies…they were sort of…liquefied. The blackness on their skin comes from the carbon freed by the combustion of methane. They are among the most efficient and lethal bombs ever used”. Doctor Mohamad Choman, director of the Shahid Salah Ghandur hospital of Bent Jbeil – a step away from the border, occupied by T’sahal until 2000 – states that he saw a man in the village of Jewahiye who was completely blackened by an Israeli bomb the third day of the war, so much so that the people of the village believed he was a seasonal worker, one of the many Nigerians drawn to southern Lebanon by the tobacco picking. Only at the hospital did they realise that he was Lebanese. The same colour was noted by doctor Hassan Karut on one of the 36 war wounded who were treated in the month of July in the hospital of Meiss el Jebel that had just been opened. The wounded man came from the nearby village of Hula, and he died during his removal to the more modern hospital of Marjayun. Neither Karut nor Choman were able to observe whether the wounded men bled copiously from the nose and ears, but they did notice how, in spite of the colour, their hair was not burned nor were there burn marks on the skin. “The first days were a hell of mangled bodies and bleeding wounds, we did not notice these wounded men particularly, all our beds were occupied and we did not know where to put the morning’s arrivals –Choman justifies himself- and moreover, only now do we have the experience to recognise these cases”. Mohamed Hassan, orthopaedist in the Ghandur hospital of Bent Jbeil, assisted three soldiers in his village of Blida, whose skin was so blackened that at first they had been taken for soldiers from Ghana stationed at Unifil. Only when the ambulance that would take them to the hospital of Marjayun arrived did the doctor notice that they were wearing Lebanese uniforms.

 

From ten different hospitals. Doctor Haidar Jouni, an orthopaedist who works in Bent Jbeil on Mondays and at the Hiram hospital of Tyre, the biggest in the region, during the rest of the week, prepared a weighty file on the matter, which was presented in December 2006 at the international “Sicot” congress of Orthopaedists, in Cairo. He collected more than 200 photos of about 30 cases of blackened bodies, and of corpses presenting anomalies which could be ascribed to the effects of chemical weapons. The only photograph similar to those taken by Doctor Cham is one of a child, who survived. During the first weeks of the war he saw hundreds of wounded admitted to hospital, coming from Bent Jbeil, Natura, Qasimiya, Aita el-Shaab. He also noticed some anomalies in several of them. The most obvious concerned people with burns below the skin, whose skin was apparently only reddened but came apart under one’s fingers with a simple touch. Many were removed to Beirut, to the Berna Centre, for a skin transplant. “I also reported tens of declarations from victims who after bombing noticed a strong odour of chemical substances, in some cases with throat irritations and frequent symptoms such as headaches and nausea”, the doctor, who does not hide his sympathies for Hezbollah, reports.

The only common trait that Peacereporter noticed in these mysterious wounded is their recurring in the first two weeks of the war, as though Israel had not used these chemically loaded devices again.

 

In Gaza as well. And in Iraq. The puzzle would seem to be solved, but there are no experiments or tests to confirm scientifically these theories. Martin Glasenapp, on the phone to Peacereporter from Frankfurt, confirmed the odd case of the corpses that were “completely blackened, but not even superficially burned, nor torn to pieces: clothes and hair were still whole. I cannot confirm that the methane theory is correct: for the moment the tests have only excluded the use of phosphorus or toxins. Certainly Medico International has several reports confirming that Israel has used thermobaric bombs and “vacuum effect” bombs in Lebanon since 1990. But we also have declarations of how last year bodies in the same condition were taken to the Shiffa hospital in Gaza. An Israeli Ong that cooperates with “Medico International”, the “Physicians for Human rights”, opened a file on those deaths, but up to now they have not obtained samples to carry out tests. Personally I have received confirmations from an Iraqi doctor who worked on the corpses from Falluja: Israel uses boosted versions of the “Daisy cutter”, that had already been used in Iraq by the USA aviation. They load the devices with a fuel that burns at extremely high temperatures, creating a vacuum effect due to the combustion of the oxygen around it. That is why the bodies look carbonised although their hair remains intact”.

 

Ah, I wish I had some myself.. Several military experts like General Fabio Mini, who were contacted by Peacereporter, confirmed that there is no convention on weapons that forbids these fuel-charged devices, on the contrary they assure us that “any general would queue up to have some”.

Dalya Ferran, in charge of External Relations for UnMacc, the UNO mission stationed in Tyre for clearing the South of Lebanon of mines, firmly sustains that “these weapons cannot be used on a civilian population or if there is even the slightest possibility that they might come into contact with civilians, as laid down by the Geneva convention on non-conventional weapons”; Dalya is Lebanese, which possibly explains the indignation with which she gives way to a not very professional or UNO-like outburst.

But if the fighter plane pilots cannot be accused of dropping illegal bombs, there still remains the human shame when faced with these mangled bodies, of witnessing something immoral. Professor Cham has a serene expression when he is about to take leave of us: “I don’t care whether Israel violated or not the Geneva Convention or any other treaty. If you take the war into the cities, among civilians, these substances cannot be used. After having witness these scenes, I believe that in this war the losers were two, Lebanese and Israelis. The only winner was peace”.