| Shoot to Maim
The Village Voice
February 21, 2001
This investigation was conducted under the auspices of
the University of
California at Berkeley
Graduate School of
Journalism, with reporting
by Sara Dunn, Chris
Smith, and Gavin Tachibana
in Amman; and Aryn
Baker, Jessie Deeter,
and Robin Shulman
in Jerusalem and the
West Bank.
***
Held up to the light, the X ray of Fouad Mahed's right
femur resembles a piece of the sky on a clear desert
night: countless specks of white scattered against an
ink-black backdrop.
But this milky way is actually hundreds of fragments
of lead and bone, the result of a bullet from an Israeli
rifle that shattered Mahed's leg. The image itself is
of something that no longer exists. After massive blood
loss, doctors were forced to amputate the limb two weeks
after the shooting.
"Surgery is easy when you know the anatomy,"
says Dr. Nasri Khoury, tracing the outline of Mahed's
femur with a pen. "But when the anatomy is destroyed,
the surgeon is at a loss."
Thousands of Palestinian young men and boys may become
permanently crippled from bullet wounds suffered during
the last five months of stone-throwing protests against
Israeli rule. As with Fouad Mahed, a carpenter from
Gaza, many of the 11,000 injuries came when unarmed
people were shot.
The high rates of crippling injuries are in large part
due to the fragmenting bullets fired by M16s. The American-made
Colt weapons, introduced during the Vietnam War as lightweight
field rifles capable of inflicting maximum damage on
the enemy, are being used increasingly by the Israel
Defense Forces against civilian demonstrators. The M16
ammunition often breaks into tiny pieces after penetration,
ripping up muscle and nerve and causing multiple internal
injuries, much like those of the internationally banned
dumdum bullets.
Forensics experts in the United States and Europe,
who agreed for this article to examine the X rays of
Fouad Mahed and other wounded Palestinians, confirm
repeated casualties from M16s, shotguns, and other live
ammunition. These images, together with other X rays
seen in West Bank and Jordanian hospitals, show a pattern
some forensics specialists call a "lead snowstorm,"
the fragmentation of high-velocity military ammunition,
fired at civilians. Many of the wounded were hit at
short range—less than 100 meters—compounding
internal damage.
The reliance on these rounds is part of what human
rights groups have denounced as excessive use of Israeli
force against mostly unarmed Palestinians. "Shooting
people with high-velocity bullets to wound them is a
form of summary punishment being inflicted in the field,"
says Dr. Robert Kirschner of the Nobel Prize-winning
Physicians for Human Rights.
It's not yet clear how newly elected prime minister
Ariel Sharon, a lifelong hard-liner, will handle the
spiraling conflict. Last week the IDF sent helicopter
gunships to assassinate a senior Palestinian security
officer. The next day, a Palestinian bus driver plowed
into a bus stop, killing seven Israeli soldiers and
one civilian. Charges continued that Israeli troops
were firing live ammunition into unarmed crowds before
trying to scatter them with tear gas or water cannons,
as the military code requires—the same charges
the IDF denied under Sharon's predecessor, Ehud Barak.
Back to Top
"Every new victim wounded or killed is not a goal
for us," says Major Olivier Rafowicz, a spokesperson.
"The violence is initiated by the other side. If
they can show victims, wounded, blood, children—it
is only serving the Palestinian interest: 'See, we are
only doing popular activities, and the bad Israeli guy
is killing us for nothing.' We are not interested in
that on the Israeli side."
Major Rafowicz argues that Israel has exercised considerable
restraint in the face of life-threatening demonstrations,
with gunfire from Palestinians. In addition, he says,
Israel has tried unsuccessfully to acquire nonlethal
riot control from several European countries. Nevertheless,
Rafowicz insists, IDF soldiers operate under strict
rules of engagement. "We open fire only on people
who are endangering our lives," he says. "You
can kill someone with a rock. A stone is a weapon."
Adds another IDF spokesperson: "We don't shoot
live bullets when nobody's shooting at us."
Yet in more than 100 interviews for this article, patients,
doctors, and medical personnel in 14 hospitals and clinics
in Jordan and the West Bank paint a far different picture.
With no shooting from the Palestinian side, and often
little or no use of tear gas to disperse the protests,
Israeli soldiers have repeatedly fired live ammunition
into unarmed crowds.
Ibrahim Mustafa Darwish, 17, was shot in the abdomen
on November 15, during protests at the Erez checkpoint
that divides Gaza from Israel. Six weeks later, he lies
in bed at Jordan Hospital in Amman. The bandages on
his abdomen are bloody and sticky, signs of multiple
surgeries to remove a meter of intestines. Israeli soldiers
fired at the 18 stone-throwers from a distance of 15
meters.
Fadi Mohammed, 18, was also shot in the abdomen in
late November while throwing rocks at a protest. The
single bullet exploded two vertebrae, injuring his kidney
and paralyzing both legs. He arrived November 30 at
Palestine Hospital in Amman, where surgeons removed
his spleen and parts of his vertebrae.
Mahmoud Al Medhoun, 15, was hit three times—in
the leg, back, and abdomen—by soldiers firing
from the hatch of a tank. One bullet lodged in his spine,
smashing three vertebrae and pinching a nerve. His right
leg is paralyzed. Doctors have removed part of his colon
and repaired his liver; he is unable to eat. "God
willing, I will walk again," declares Mahmoud.
But when his father cites the doctors' opinion that
the paralysis is probably permanent, the boy rolls himself
into a ball, burying his face in the crook of his arm
and crying.
Crippling injuries among Palestinians are estimated
at 1500—a figure likely to rise as more of the
wounded seek rehabilitation. Palestinian officials say
the rate of disabling injuries during this Al Aqsa Intifada,
which began in the shadow of East Jerusalem's Al Aqsa
Mosque on September 29, is higher than during the first
intifada, which lasted from 1987 to 1993. "The
Israeli response to this intifada has been more ferocious,
swifter, and more intensive," says Dr. Mustafa
Barghouti, head of the Union of Palestinian Medical
Relief Committees.
Lethal fire has come from M16, M3, and M24 snipers'
rifles, and from higher-caliber munitions, including
concrete-busting machine-gun bullets, grenade launchers,
120-millimeter tank shells, and Hellfire rockets fired
from American-made Apache attack helicopters. The heavier
fire, say Israeli analysts, has come in response to
Palestinian sniping. But even the more benign ammunition
designed for riot control, like so-called rubber bullets—steel
balls coated with a thin layer of rubber—can be
fatal if fired at short range. "They are the nightmare
of the neurosurgeon," says Dr. Jihad Mashal. "Every
time the patient moves his head, it's like a marble
moving in jelly. There's nothing you can do about it."
In the first weeks of the Intifada, head and upper-body
injuries accounted for a great portion of Palestinian
casualties. "A large part of those wounded by live
bullets are those we indeed wanted to not only injure
but kill," wrote General Giora Eiland in a letter
to Israeli human rights lawyer Neta Amar. "These
are the same people that shoot at us with live ammunition.
The fact that most of them are wounded in the upper
body or head is a positive thing."
After a flurry of international condemnation, the rate
of head and chest injuries dropped, replaced by devastating
leg and abdomen wounds. "I consider it a form of
torture," says Kirschner of Physicians for Human
Rights. "There's no question in my mind that this
was a very conscious military decision to use this weapon
to wound people as a form of intimidation of the population.
And as a result, probably several thousand young Palestinian
men will end up with permanent disabilities."
The M16 ammunition was at first mistaken by Palestinian
doctors for the dumdum bullet, banned by the Hague Convention
in 1899. "Many people think that it's a dumdum
bullet, because if it does penetrate deep enough, it
will break," says Martin Fackler, a former army
surgeon who now runs ballistics tests for the U.S. Department
of Defense. "Fragmentation does cause more wounds."
The weapon was introduced in 1963, as an experiment
with the South Vietnamese army during the Kennedy administration.
Soon reports came back from the field, recounted in
a 1995 article in the International Review of the Red
Cross, of a bullet that "does cartwheels as it
penetrates living flesh, causing a highly lethal wound
that looks like anything but a caliber .22 hole."
By 1966, army doctors reported "gaping, devastated
area[s] of soft tissue and even bone, often with loss
of large amounts of tissue" and a disintegrating
bullet. Seven years later, reports were circulating
about wounds that looked like those caused by the expanding
dumdum bullets, banned for causing "superfluous
injury or unnecessary suffering."
Years of experiments revealed that the lightweight
M16 bullet was prone to "yaw" and "tumble"
more quickly after penetration—giving it greater
potential to rip apart tissue by flying through the
body sideways. The higher velocity—a trait now
shared with other military rifles—also meant the
bullet created a larger "temporary cavity,"
destroying solid, less flexible tissues like the spleen
and liver—a pattern of injury borne out in Palestinian
medical records. And the bullet fragmented more, causing
multiple injuries from tiny pieces of lead, each on
its own haywire path.
The old dumdum had been banned from the battlefield,
but now some worried that a new bullet, with similar
consequences, was taking its place. For years, disputes
over what actually caused the wounds—the bullet's
velocity, its tumbling, its fragmentation—slowed
efforts to ban the ammunition. In 1995, the Swiss introduced
an initiative to bring the M16 ammunition, along with
others, under the umbrella of the Hague Convention.
In his analysis of the Swiss effort in the International
Review of the Red Cross, the humanitarian scholar Eric
Prokosch urged states to "seize the opportunity"
for the "adoption of the strongest possible ban
on the modern dumdum bullets."
Some ballistics experts in Europe agree. Dr. Peter
J.T. Knudsen, a Danish forensic pathologist who has
written extensively on bullets and humanitarian law,
argues that all M16 ammunition currently used by military
forces should be banned, because they all tend to shatter.
"Fragmentation adds unnecessary suffering and superfluous
injury," he says.
Others caution that the M16 should not be singled out
in what amounts to a political struggle rooted in the
Cold War.
"The concept of 'inhumane' rifle bullets is a
product of minds who know nothing of real war, and usually
have ulterior—usually political—motives,"
says Fackler, who points out that heavier military bullets,
with greater mass, also produce large wounds. "I
have seen many soldiers who have had both legs and an
arm blown off by explosive devices: land mines, artillery,
etc. That is inhumane. There are no rifles on the battlefield
that can disrupt anywhere near that much tissue. So
does it make good sense to declare a rifle bullet inhumane
and ignore the weapons that cause far more tissue disruption?"
Defenders of the M16 say attempts to ban the rifle's
5.56mm ammunition were started by the Soviet Union,
envious of the US and NATO's lightweight, efficient
military rifle. That claim is disputed, but the issue
remains politically charged. After years of testing
and repeated international meetings, some humanitarian
and ballistics experts would like to raise the issue
of high-velocity, fragmenting bullets at an international
conference in Europe later this year. They say it's
time that weapons causing the same degree of unnecessary
harm as the old dumdum bullets be placed under the same
kind of ban.
Back to Top
Chances for that appear slim. After floating a proposal
that might have put restrictions on the M16 ammunition,
potentially forcing NATO countries to develop entirely
new, nonfragmenting ammunition, the Swiss government
now appears ready to offer a more modest plan.
"Can you imagine if there were an attempt to ban
5.56[mm] bullets?" asks Denmark's Dr. Knudsen.
"Think about all the countries that would have
to discard all their M16 ammunition." Even if they
replaced it with the nonfragmenting bullets being tested,
there's still a stark political reality: None of the
"safer" bullets are manufactured in America.
"Imagine if you told the US Army they would have
to buy all their bullets from a foreign country,"
Knudsen says. "Or how about the senator in whose
state the bullets are made? There's too much money involved."
As humanitarians debate whether to consider a ban on
ammunition they believe excessively harmful to soldiers,
the IDF continues to use the weapons on unarmed Palestinian
civilians. Live ammunition has been used "routinely
in an illegal and indiscriminate manner," a Human
Rights Watch report said of the IDF, "resulting
in deaths and injuries to civilians."
Nasri Showkat lies in his bed in Jordan Hospital, waiting
for doctors to extract the last bullet fragments, lodged
near his left eye socket. The graying edges of his short
black hair and his thin silver-frame glasses give a
learned look to Showkat, a history major who was due
to graduate this year. On October 25, he joined hundreds
of demonstrators in Ramallah. They marched to the Israeli-guarded
checkpoint and threw their stones. When Showkat saw
his friend shot in the head, he rushed out and was himself
shot, he says, by a sniper. The bullet hit Showkat in
the upper lip, exploding into seven fragments inside
his head. He lost the teeth on one side of his mouth,
which he covers with one hand when he tries to speak.
Amjad, 22, was hit in the head in the West Bank town
of Jenin. X rays show a bullet lodged in the back of
his skull. His arms are listless and floppy like a rag
doll's, and the room smells like excrement.
Mohammad Nada, 17 years old, was shot twice by an Israeli
sniper on Dec. 1 while clearing debris in front of his
sister's house, close to the site of daily clashes in
Ramallah. The second shot went into his left buttock
and hit his sciatic nerve, which controls the up-and-down
movement of the foot. X rays show evidence of a high-velocity
bullet, which fragmented into hundreds of pieces. Doctors
say he needs a graft to repair the nerve.
Isa Abu Abdullah, 19, was confronted by Israeli tanks
in Gaza on the third morning of Ramadan, November 29.
He threw stones, then was hit by a bullet in the left
calf. While down, he was hit by six more bullets: three
in his left thigh, two in his right thigh, and one in
his right arm. Doctors at the Shifa Hospital in Gaza
moved part of an artery from his right leg to his left,
then sent him to Amman for further surgery.
Mahmoud Odeili, 23, lives in Gaza, near the Israeli
settlement of Gush Katif, a constant flashpoint. Now
he fills a bed in Amman's Shmesani Hospital. The unemployed
father of two barely opens his mouth when he speaks,
because of the high-velocity bullet that smashed his
jaw before exiting through the back of his neck. He
says he and his friends ran out to throw stones at an
Israeli demolition crew sent to destroy their houses.
He was shot by a soldier in a tank 100 meters away.
"They shot us and kept going," he says.
"How many patients do you want to see?" asks
Dr. Ghazi Hanania of the Abu Raya Rehabilitation Centre
in Ramallah. The doctor, in a gray charcoal suit with
a red scarf, looks across his desk with deeply tired
eyes. "You can talk to 2,000 patients if you want
to."
Outside the center, four young men in wheelchairs gather
at the curb, soaking up the December sun. Nasser Bilali,
his leg in a heavy cast, says he was just walking home
when clashes broke out. In the confusion he was hit
by a high-velocity bullet that shredded several bones
in his left foot. He's not sure if he'll walk again
without crutches; it will be months before he can even
think about going back to work. "I can't consider
myself a hero," says Bilali. "Because I didn't
even throw stones. I was just walking and I got shot."
An old woman in a white headscarf and a black Palestinian
dress has been listening to Bilali's story. She begins
to yell and wave her arms. "Look at him! He's young,
and he's already in a wheelchair. Haram! Haram! This
is a crime! This is a crime! We're using stones. They're
using bombs and rockets and tanks!" She points
to the rehab center's second floor. "My son is
upstairs. A woman pours out the blood of her heart to
raise a son through poverty and hardship, and now he
gets shot."
Dr. Hanania says he is not so worried about the hundreds
of patients his staff is contending with now. "The
problem is what will be coming to the center in the
coming days," he says. Because the Israelis are
limiting freedom of movement between West Bank towns
and villages, the doctor says, it's impossible to estimate
how many young men will need rehabilitative care. But
when the roads open, Dr. Hanania expects a flood. "There
are reports that there are 25 to 30 percent of the injured
in need of rehabilitative care"—several thousand
people, given the current casualty figures. "If
that's true, it's a national disaster."
Across the Jordan River in Amman, Dr. Khoury pulls
back Fouad Mahed's bedcovers to reveal a bandaged stump—the
remnants of his right leg. After he was hit, doctors
in Gaza pumped 17 pints of blood into Mahed, to replace
that which was pouring from the wound. Complications
from a skin graft forced doctors to send him to Amman,
where he could get treatment unavailable in the Gaza
hospitals.
Khoury has operated on hundreds of injured Palestinians
dating back to the first intifada. But never has he
seen so many severely wounded. He puts his hand on Mahed's
shoulder. "This guy is amazing," says Dr.
Khoury. "After all he's been through"—the
shooting, the amputation, the formation of ulcers that
almost killed him—"the smile never leaves
his face."
Mahed was shot in Gaza just after returning home from
an afternoon of prayer. Israeli shells began to fall
in his Khan Yunis neighborhood, 100 meters from an Israeli
military installation. When parts of his ceiling caved
in, Mahed, who says he has never taken part in the protests,
decided to bring his wife and daughter to his brother's
house. Just outside his door, he was hit.
The question of whether lethal force is justified rests
in determining whether police or security forces are
acting to defend themselves or others against the threat
of imminent death or serious injury. Israeli officials
say they are shooting in response to shooting. "The
Palestinians are not only throwing stones like 10 years
ago," says Major Rafowicz of the IDF, "but
also using rifles, Kalashnikovs, within the demonstration."
Back to Top Even in such cases, Israeli forces, supported by tanks
and high-caliber fire from helicopter gunships, have
often overwhelmed the Palestinian side. "Usually
the Palestinian fire is pathetic," an anonymous
IDF sniper told the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz. "The
shooting is totally pathetic. . . . You know that most
of it will be into the air."
Despite headlines describing a conflict between two
armies—and despite repeated calls from Israeli
and US officials that it is the Palestinians who must
stop the violence—approximately 90 percent of
the dead and wounded have been Palestinians or Israeli
Arabs. The IDF's own figures indicate that in three-quarters
of the clashes, there was no Palestinian gunfire. "Israel's
policy is directed in large part against the Palestinian
civilian population, which is not firing at Israeli
civilians or IDF soldiers and is the primary victim
of Israel's human rights violations," says a recent
report by B'tselem, the respected Israeli human rights
group.
Of the dozens of patients interviewed in the 14 hospitals,
all but four said they were throwing stones, coming
to the aid of another wounded person, or simply walking
past a flashpoint when they were shot. One patient admitted
to firing a gun when hit; three others said they were
throwing Molotov cocktails.
"Molotov cocktails can kill," says Major
Rafowicz.
According to human rights groups, even the gasoline
bombs pose little threat to soldiers equipped for riot
control. "The Israeli security services were almost
invariably well-defended, located at a distance from
demonstrators in good cover, in blockhouses, behind
wire or well-protected by riot shields," Amnesty
International concluded in its October report. "Certainly,
stones—or even petrol bombs—cannot be said
to have endangered the lives of Israeli security services
in any of the instances examined by Amnesty International."
The Palestinians, by comparison, have been easy targets.
Shadi Masri, 24, was shot three times in the abdomen
on November 16, after throwing Molotov cocktails at
a tank. Beside his bed at Amman Surgical Hospital stands
a Palestinian flag. On the wall hangs a poster of Yasir
Arafat, superimposed over a crowd of protesters. Masri
doesn't know how long it took him to get to Jordan,
but says he does remember Israeli soldiers taking his
picture and punching him in the ambulance. It was the
third time he was injured during this intifada.
Mohammed Bassam, 15, was shot while protesting on November
26 in Birzeit, near Ramallah. A high-velocity bullet
went through his shin, crushing the bone. Surgeons inserted
steel rods through his leg and an "external fixator"
resembling perforated file-cabinet rods. He uses a walker
to get around his hospital room. Adil, 31, was shot
during what he says was a peaceful protest following
a funeral of a man killed in the clashes. A bullet splintered
a bone in his left leg. Adil says he saw fragments of
the limb in the street before he passed out.
Morad, 15, breathes slowly, with the aid of a respirator.
The machine clicks, his chest fills with air, it clicks
again, his chest falls. His eyelids are purple and swollen,
his head wrapped in a bandage. A heart monitor is connected
to his chest. A bullet is lodged in his brain.
Sharif Darwish, 34, sits sideways on his bed at Hussein
Hospital in Beit Jala, near Bethlehem. A heavy cast
holds in place the shattered bones of his foot. "The
guy who carried me to the ambulance was killed,"
he says. Darwish stares ahead at nothing. A few weeks
before, a rocket hit his Beit Jala house, landing next
to his bedroom. "I had just woken up to get some
breakfast," he says.
Palestinians, almost without exception, trace the beginnings
of the Al Aqsa Intifada to the September 28 arrival
of Ariel Sharon at Haram al-Sharif (the Noble Sanctuary,
or Temple Mount to the Israelis), backed by a thousand
Israeli troops and riot police. The high casualties,
they say, began as part of a brute-force strategy by
then prime minister Ehud Barak to try to achieve a swift
end to the conflict.
"These are good tactics if one wants to wipe out
an enemy," said Dr. Stephen Males, a former senior
police officer in the U.K. who accompanied an Amnesty
International fact-finding team to the region. "They
are not policing."
Israelis say Sharon's visit was merely an excuse to
adopt a carefully orchestrated intifada planned and
backed by the Palestinian Authority. "We are talking
about a very organized and very planned violent strategy
chosen by the P.A. to try to achieve political goals
from the very beginning," says Major Rafowicz.
"To try more quickly to achieve political objectives,
mainly, we believe, to improve the Palestinian position
abroad by reinforcing the image of the underdog of the
big, bad Israeli.
"We have been dragged into this situation not
by our own policy. We look very bad on TV because we
are a regular army facing a so-called popular demonstration.
But on the other side it is a strategy."
Publicly, IDF officials keep to their explanations
of restraint in the face of violence. General Eiland,
in his letter to the Israeli human rights lawyer, wrote:
"[W]ithin a rioting crowd of unarmed residents,
there are also those . . . who are armed. You cannot
demand of a soldier to shoot only when he is convinced
there is no danger for whoever stands next to a Palestinian
opening fire at him."
Privately, some IDF soldiers and generals have been
telling Israeli journalists something else. "I
don't know if the IDF takes revenge," an IDF sniper
told the newspaper Ha'aretz. "But every time, after
there's a serious incident, it's political, you can
feel it. You as a soldier know that if in the papers
today they have written about a lot of things that happened
to the IDF, then they will allow you to shoot more."
The sniper told Ha'aretz that soldiers are allowed
to shoot at Palestinians who pose a potential threat,
as long as they appear to be over the age of 12. "Twelve
and up is allowed," said the sniper. A senior IDF
officer told another Ha'aretz reporter: "Nobody
can convince me we didn't needlessly kill dozens of
children."
The high casualties sustained by Palestinians during
the first two months of clashes, and the international
condemnation of Israel that followed, have prompted
a shift in tactics on both sides. Casualties began to
decline in December, says Ghassan Khatib, director of
the Jerusalem Media and Communications Center. He calls
that decrease "a sign of fewer massive demonstrations
at Israeli army checkpoints."
This is not an indication of renewed faith in the prospects
for peace. Palestinians, says Khatib, have lost faith
in an Oslo process that they no longer believe can deliver
on basic issues of sovereignty, Jerusalem, and the right
of Palestinians to return to their homeland. Increasingly,
says Khatib, Palestinians are equating discussions of
peace and security with the continuation of the Israeli
occupation. A recent poll by the Jerusalem Media and
Communications Center shows two-thirds of Palestinians
support the most extreme measures, including suicide
bombings, "under the current political conditions."
The poll also indicates 70 percent of Palestinians support
continuing the Al Aqsa Intifada.
In the hospital interviews in Jordan and the West Bank,
young men appeared eager to again pick up the stone.
Mohammed Mahmoud Abu Fodeh, at 22, is already a veteran
of the Palestinian struggle. Now, he lies in a bed in
Amman's Specialty Physiotherapy Hospital, after being
shot twice while protesting at the checkpoint between
Jericho and the Allenby Bridge into Jordan. One high-velocity
bullet lodged in his left shoulder. Another pierced
a lung. His friends thought he was dead, until they
saw him crawling toward the ambulance. The bullet from
his chest rests in a jar beside his bed, "for memory
and for evidence," he says.
"We're not afraid of their bullets, but they fear
our stones," he says. "God gave us the stone—it
has God's will in it. It's all we have.
"The stone has awakened the Arab world, from the
leaders to the laymen," he says. "This is
only the beginning."
Back to Top |
|
Selected Works
for
Sandy Tolan
Books
The Lemon Tree
Me and Hank
Articles
First-Person Narratives in Radio
Quintessential Gloucester
Shoot to Maim
Vanishing Forests, Endangered People
When is a Handful of Beans Not Just a Handful of Beans?
Despair Feeds Hatred, Extremism
Baseball's Chasm Between Heroes
Radio
 The Lemon Tree
Oil in Ecuador's Amazon
Ecuador's Golden Cities
Quichua Indians and Oil
Ecuador's Resource Battle I
Ecuador's Resource Battle II |
