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.

10 thoughts on “More on that 237,000-shell artillery bombardment”

  1. I find it interesting that the Israeli commenters here, and their supporters of less certain location, have had nothing to say about the figure of 237,000 shells. I agree, there is nothing to say. 237,000 is hardly a figure which speaks of a victimised country defending itself against monstrous enemies.

  2. There seems to be some curiosity about why Israel decided to use cluster bombs in the last 72 hours of the war — but if you stop and think for a second, the reason is obvious. A major part of the reason for this war was to force the population (and hence Hezbollah) out of the south of Lebanon. Force them out, and keep them out — ethnic cleansing. The cluster bombs were simply one way of insuring people would not come back — or would leave, if they had survived the bombing.

  3. There seems to be some curiosity about why Israel decided to use cluster bombs in the last 72 hours of the war — but if you stop and think for a second, the reason is obvious. A major part of the reason for this war was to force the population (and hence Hezbollah) out of the south of Lebanon. Force them out, and keep them out — ethnic cleansing. The cluster bombs were simply one way of insuring people would not come back — or would leave, if they had survived the bombing.

  4. This work of document aggregation that you are doing is extremely valuable. Much too little of it is being done. This blog will be a primary resource for those who will later have the job of following the trail of documents to establish the details that will be essential for pinning down the war criminals. Generalities won’t do.

  5. A major part of the reason for this war was to force the population (and hence Hezbollah) out of the south of Lebanon. Force them out, and keep them out — ethnic cleansing. The cluster bombs were simply one way of insuring people would not come back — or would leave, if they had survived the bombing.
    Good point. Unfortunately for the Israelis, this tactic, like the rest of their tactics in Lebanon, appears to have failed to achieve its purpose. The people have, indeed, returned.

  6. Salah, thanks for the link, which was very informative. But I’m curious as to why you call this ISRAELI propaganda. I don’t think that Israelis were the ones doctoring the photos or staging false scenes to exaggerate or overdramatize the damage. It’s more likely that this was propaganda from Hezbollah and their sympathizers.
    Nevertheless, it is very informative, even if somewhat off topic.

  7. Joshua, But I’m curious as to why you call this ISRAELI propaganda.
    I think the main point here they tried (if it’s right what they said) to be more beside Israeli position than Lebanon/Arab. The structure of religious/Jewish things which not worry me as much as the way they talking about fake photos.
    This what many times we argue here about the media/propaganda objective using things to market their stock, as we seeing right now the folding of US reports and truths about Iraq and the war on Iraq, how the media played massive prewar convincing the westerner that Iraq is a big danger in the world.
    It might a good to pick your attention to that incident of that US guy he put in the internet a movie showing him was kidnapped by some group inside Iraq with some swards in the background with sound “Allah Akbar”, he was handcuffed and with ORANG suite and the rest of it, then its all clear its a hoax after his family worried and contact him to find he is inside US he never been in Iraq, he did that movie for a jock.
    So this is the point here who make these things he doing it for a reason not really to reflect the truth in all the cases, as we seeing it in the link I posted, the point here what ever fake photos here about reporting from inside Lebanon, can you tell me that “237,000-shell artillery bombardment” how mach damage caused and how many civilians killed? May be more weapons used and not reported, can you tell the truth what the damage in Lebanon right now?
    We know that Israelis had some damage by Hezbollah rockets and they played that to be big using the pictures and media, but comparing with the distractions and killing in Lebanon there is no comparison there is a huge deferens in the lose and damage done by Israelis.
    Last thing here I saw about 5 years ago a documentary about Kosovo war, one of the documentary focused on a pies of one girl (10 years old) they chose here for media/propaganda machine, they explained exactly how they done it truthfully, so they choose the girl hold flowers with big demolish background, then they changed the followers with a cat as they said its more convincing and more effective to see girl holding her cat in a war time than holding flowers, its done and they got good propaganda from that.

  8. Salah,
    Just for the record, the “documentary” you are describing is “Wag the Dog”; not a documentary at all. It was a complete work of fiction about a fake war in Albania, not the war in Kosovo (which coincidentally took place during a presidential sex scandal).

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