Sunday, October 03, 2004

Arafat: Israel is "using illegal weapons"

Israel´s use of weapons banned by international agreements, which it has itself signed, is well known fact. Fragmentation weapons are one, and they also used in Lebanon nail grenades. But what comes to the deaths caused by Hamas rockets, I think that Arafat is wrong, even if they really do very little damage. In pictures of their effects that I have seen they leave in ground a hole less than a meter in size and only a few tens of centimeters deep. So they have to hit very close even to hurt anyone, but in three cases they have caused death. In reality they are very very uneffective weapons and it´s impossible to know where they hit. In some cases they have even fallen in Gaza itself. Of course, at the beginning of the Iraq war, US cruise missiles fired at Iraq from ships in the Red Sea sometimes fell at Saudi-Arabia and few flew to Iran. During the 1998 bombing of al-Qaida camps in Afghanistan some US cruise missiles fell in Pakistan and it was claimed that Pakistan´s missile program profited from these examples of more modern missiles than their own at the time.