Every few months, the organization “Human Rights Watch” releases a report accusing a major anti-Iranian nation of using white phosphorus rounds against civilians. It’s consistent, well-documented, factually correct, and a flaming lie all at once.

“But how could that be? Is it white phosphorus or not? Is phosphorus illegal or not?”

Glad you asked. I’ll tell you.

The above is a box of “Strike Anywhere” wooden matches. The heads are phosphorus. If you’ve ever burned yourself with one, you’ll remember. Make the mistake of dropping a lit match into the box and you may lose your house. Phosphorus burns hot and fast, and it’s nearly impossible to extinguish.

Note, just for the moment, that these matches not only are legal to use, but can in fact be purchased in almost any grocery store. Some studies have shown that the vapors can cause lung damage, but you’d need to breathe in an awful lot of smoke for it to matter much.

The above is an AP file photo showing the effect of a smoke round, likely artillery. Each of those little bright dots is the approximate equivalent of a lit three-pack of safety matches, and the average artillery smoke round carries around a hundred. Properly deployed, smoke rounds ignite in air (hence the cloud of smoke a hundred feet off the ground) and are mostly, though not entirely, burnt by the time they touch ground. This shell appears to be at least the second to impact this location; judging from the remains of the structure, the first was high explosive. Thus, the small fires in nearby shrubs are likely fragments of flaming building.

There are many reports of civilians and, more rarely, combatants taking severe disfiguring burns from smoke rounds. They are extremely dangerous. Mind you, so is almost anything that’s fired out of an artillery cannon. Smoke rounds are less dangerous than antipersonnel or high explosive rounds, simply because they’re designed to be. The purpose of smoke rounds is to block vision, so people inside the cloud of smoke can’t see who to shoot at. They are as defensive a weapon as exists.

And they are perfectly legal, even according to the most stringent of international laws on warfare.

There’s a very good reason that the use of incendiary munitions against civilians is against the laws of warfare, and you’re looking at it. This is a picture of Tokyo during the firebombing of 1945. A city constructed largely of paper and wood, it was burned nearly flat by an American bombing raid. More Japanese civilians lost their lives and homes from this than from both subsequent atomic bombs combined. Thousands of survivors were badly burned, scarred for life.

It’s worthy of note that Japan had done as bad or worse when they were attacking in China, that they routinely ignored all the Geneva Convention articles, and so on. That doesn’t justify this act; nothing can. There is never a moral justification for any act of warfare, because war itself is a crime.

This is how wars were fought before incendiaries were restricted, and now wars are not fought this way. We can tell by the absence of vast burned cities, the tens of thousands of civilians without disfiguring phosphorus burns, and so on.

It’s important to note here that incendiaries continue to be used by every military force in the world. Every rocket launched from Gaza by Hamas, every explosive missile used for counterfire, every tracer round — all of these are, or contain, incendiaries. The Geneva Convention and the laws of war require only that reasonable efforts be taken to minimize civilian casualties.

If you’re a civilian in a war zone, there is no force on Earth that can protect you.

About the Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International Reports

On rare occasions, a smoke round is fired and detonates lower than design specs indicate. When one is firing hundreds or thousands of rounds per day under combat conditions, this is certain to happen — and when it does, someone’s watching.

A quick note: It would be wrong to state that HRW and Amnesty are pro-Iran pro-terrorism liars out to start a new Holocaust and burn all the Jews, in part because they might sue and we’re not insured, but mainly because it’s not true. Doubtless most of the non-governmental donors, some volunteers, and at least a few of their administrators aren’t. Quite a few people who work for or with these groups are actually very fine people who are engaged in a heroic battle to save lives on a daily basis, and they’re worthy of admiration.

However, that’s not to say that their organizations (1) have no anti-Israeli or anti-US biases, or (2) have any interest in telling the truth. It’s common practice among organizations funded by charitable donation to show disaster porn, paint it in the worst possible light, and use it to raise money. HRW and Amnesty are not so principled that they value absolute truth over their own cause, and it’s even reasonable, from a certain perspective, for them to lie to you in order to get your money.

In the specific case of the most recent HRW report, it indicates that there were multiple documented instances of smoke rounds being deployed against residences in southern Lebanon. Israel not being in the real estate business in that vicinity, their claim that most of their operations are counterfire against missile, rocket, and projectile launchers is certainly a believable one, and the use of smoke rounds against enemy attackers is fairly customary, so we can likely stipulate that as well without any real danger.

This latest report claims no civilian burns from incendiaries. Instead, it focuses on respiratory problems from smoke. This is reasonable too. What’s not reasonable is the suggestion – overt implication – outright accusation that Israel is engaging in a war crime by launching smoke rounds. Consider only that counterfire is intended to destroy enemy launchers and ammunition on the ground and ask if, perhaps, the respiratory distress might have been caused by hundreds of burning Hezbollah rockets. Should Israel simply wait until they’ve all been launched before shooting?

And where’s the outrage about Hamas and Hezbollah continuously and deliberately firing incendiaries against Israeli civilian targets — not a mere 34 times since last year, but on a daily basis?

I detect some bias.

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