IDF “Secret experimental Weapons” Slur Revived

There was also one 'unconfirmed' report of terminator like figures in this last Gaza war.

IDF “Secret experimental Weapons” Slur Revived. HT: HonestReporting.

The Irish Times has published the following, written, incidentally, by Robert Fisk’s ex-wife, Lara Marlowe:

Doctors and an ambulance officer believe Israel tested new weapons during its July 8th – August 26th assault on the Gaza Strip.

Ambulance officer Ibrahim Abu Kas of the Palestinian Red Crescent Society has worked through the last three wars between Israel and Hamas. “In this war, I saw things I never could have imagined,” he says. “The five children from the al-Jaal family in Zeitoun were the strangest thing I ever saw in my life.”

The room where three girls and two boys were sleeping was hit by an Israeli tank shell while their mother, father and grandmother sat in another room. “Their bodies were hot. Their hair and skin were black liked charred wood. When their parents arrived at the hospital, they didn’t recognise them,” Abu Kas continues. “But there had been no fire, only white smoke.”

The unsubstantiated rumors and innuendo continue:

Doctors at Shifa hospital heard rumours of chemical weapons or gas. “I saw a man whose limbs were jerking and he could not breathe before he died, but he had no wounds,” Abu Kas recounts. Earlier, he had picked up people who were suffocating but survived.

 While he makes no accusations of this nature, it’s no coincidence that Mads Gilbert is once again on the scene:

Whatever new weapons Israel may have used, “The worst illegal weapons are the siege, which is illegal collective punishment, the disproportionate use of force and the lack of discrimination between civilian and military targets,” says the Norwegian doctor Mads Gilbert, who worked at Shifa during the war.

Perhaps most interestingly is the input of Dr Sobhi Skaik, chief surgeon and medical director at Shifa hospital, in the Irish Times story. For Dr Skaik was also making almost identical accusations in 2006:

What is happening is frightening. It’s possible the Israeli army was using Gaza to experiment militarily.
. . .
Local doctors say a number of both widespread and unusual injuries may indicate that new types of weapons were used on the Gaza population during the war. Health officials are seeing wounds they have never seen before, or at least not on such a massive scale.

“There has been a significant loss of life here in Gaza for reasons that are unexplainable medically,” said Dr. Skaik.

That Israel has advanced weapons that are capable of causing immense destruction is not a surprise. Neither is it a surprise that the same politicized medical professionals should be promoting a story that Israel is employing weapons that are so diabolical as to be like nothing ever used by any other conventional army.

Lara Marlowe’s story is based on already discredited “eyewitnesses.” 

Had she looked into the history of these types of libels, perhaps she would have approached her story with a healthier degree of skepticism. However, based on a series of one-sided pieces from Gaza written by Marlowe since the beginning of the month, it is more likely that she was only too willing to believe the latest weapons libel to emerge from Gaza. Read the full story here.