“When the bomb exploded from the plane. I felt I was in hell. Real hell,” shouts 31-year-old Ghassan stabbing the air with his finger and straining over the side of his grubby hospital bed. Professing allegiance to Palestinian national security, Ghassan went to Gaza’s Maghazi refugee camp last week to fight the Israelis during a particularly bloody incursion. “I feel chemicals. I feel high heat, I feel high pain,” he elaborates in English, both legs heavily bandaged, as patients and visitors brush past in a crowded corridor of Gaza’s Al-Shifa hospital. “They found shrapnel with ‘test’ written on it,” he shouts.Accusations abound that the Israelis, pressing a nearly five-week offensive in which 130 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza, are using a new weapon. Doctors say they have never before seen such specific burn injuries, concentrated so much on the lower body and causing such a high propensity of amputations. The Health Ministry has already called for an independent inquiry.
A French humanitarian group reported unusually severe injuries. One of its doctors reportedly raised the possibility that Israel used cluster bombs. In response to a query about use of a new type of weapon possibly containing chemicals, the army said only that “specific claims are being checked.”