More on that 237,000-shell artillery bombardment

Today’s HaAretz has an informative article on Israel’s use of artillery, including a new form of “cluster rocket” as well as cluster bombs. It’s by Meron Rapoport.
He writes this:

Y., a reservist… , fired at least 15 cluster shells. “It was in the last days of the war,” he says. “They gave us orders to fire them. They didn’t tell us where we were firing – if it was at a village or at open terrain. We fired until the forces that requested the shelling asked us to stop.”
Another peculiarity involves the type of shells that were used. The 155-mm. artillery batteries use two types: American-made shells, known in the IDF by the acronym matzrash, and Israeli-made shells, called tze’if. Y. learned that with the Israeli cluster shells, the percentage of duds – i.e., of bombs that essentially became land mines – was lower than that of the American-made ones, and yet they fired only the latter kind. But the major portion of the damage wasn’t done, apparently, by the 155-mm. guns that S. and Y. fired, rather, apparently, by the new MRLS rocket launchers that the IDF used in operations for the first time in the second Lebanon war.
In the late 1990s, the IDF purchased 48 of these launchers from the United States. Each one holds 12 rockets, which act essentially like large cluster bombs. According to the official specifications, each such rocket contains no fewer than 644 tiny bomblets that are supposed to disperse in a 100-meter radius above the target. “Like a soccer field full of bombs,” is how one artillery reservist described it.
Y. says that his battalion commander said that when the IDF Apache helicopter came down near Ramot Naftali, killing its two pilots, one suspicion was that it had been hit by such a rocket that had been fired in the area at the time. It was later determined that this was likely not the cause, but the discussion of such a possibility basically amounted to an official admission that such rockets were indeed being used against southern Lebanon. How many exactly? It’s hard to know. The UN people have no precise data on the breakdown of unexploded ordnance from MRLS rockets, or American or Israeli cluster shells.
[UN humanitarian coordinator for Lebanon David] Shearer says it’s clear that most use of the cluster weapons was made in the final 72 hours of the war. “In the beginning of the war, too, there were reports on the use of cluster bombs,” he says. “But only a few. In the three last days, a tremendous amount of them were fired. It’s also hard to know where they were aimed. The dispersion of the bombs is so wide that even if the original target were outside a populated area, many bombs fell amid the houses.”
Y. and S. [both reservists in the IDF artillery force] confirm this appraisal of events. “In the last 72 hours we fired all the munitions we had, all at the same spot,” says Y. “We didn’t even alter the direction of the gun. Friends of mine in the battalion told me they also fired everything in the last three days – ordinary shells, clusters, whatever they had.”

Rapoport started his piece with more exploration of the situation regarding the targeting of some of the IDF’s artillery:

S.is a reservist in an artillery battalion, and he is not at ease with what he did during the second Lebanon war. He fired shells [not cluster bomb shells, apparently; but not lollipops either, ~HC], sometimes at a rate of one per minute. He and his fellow soldiers fired 200 shells one night and on other nights, “only” 50 or 80. S. doesn’t know what damage was done by the shells he fired. He didn’t see where they fell. He doesn’t even know exactly where they were aimed. Artillery gunners like him only receive coordinates, numbers, not names of villages. Even those commanding the team or the battery don’t know exactly what they’re firing at.
“Tell me, how do the villages there look? Are they all destroyed?” S. asked me after I told him that I was in contact with UN personnel who were patrolling the villages. What really made something inside S. snap was when his battalion was given an entire village as a target one night. He thinks it was Taibeh, a village in what is called the eastern sector, but he’s not sure. The battalion commander assembled the men and told them that the whole village had been divided into parts and that each team was supposed to “flood” its alloted space – without specific targets, simply to bombard the village.
“I told myself that the people left in that village must be the weaker ones, like in Haifa,” says S. “I felt that we were acting like Hezbollah. Taking houses and turning them into targets. That’s terror. My soul is important to me. When I hug my girlfriend, I want to feel good about myself. And I don’t feel good about what I did in the war. I felt like I really should have tossed my weapon and run away.”

Remember that each one of these artillery shells carries a serious explosive charge. (Remember the size of the artillery shells in the pics of the Israeli girls lining up to “sign” them– they were taller than some of those girls there, I recall.)
Rapoport writes that, “One reservist artillery officer estimated that the Israel Defense Forces fired about 160,000 shells during the recent war.” However, this article in yesterday’s HaAretz reported that IDF officers told a Knesset committee that the number had been around 237,000. Anyway, to put this in perspective, Rapoport notes that in the Yom Kippur, which was a large engagement fought on two fronts– one of them the very broad Sinai front– against the regular armies of two significant Arab states, “the IDF fired less than 100,000 shells.”
He notes that in the recent war Israel also fired “several hundred cluster rockets and cluster bombs” and then tells us more about those, as noted above.
Altogether, this report gives us more info about Israel’s extremely profligate– indeed, quite possibly “indiscriminate”– use of artillery during the war, in general. It adds significant new details to the cluster bombs story. (See also the Aug 17 HRW report on that, and this Sep 5 report from the UN’s IRIN news service.) And it also gives us some hints of where people might look to find info about the chain of command that had authorized and led to these firings and the apparently indiscriminate content of some of those orders. All of which is vital info in this context.