Lawyers: Israel uses uranium in Gaza offensive
GAZA, June 11 (Xinhua) — Lawyers investigating possible war crimes by Israel in the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip Thursday said the Jewish state used uranium in recent offensive on the blockaded territory.
Findings indicated that Israel heavily used uranium materials in its war in Gaza, Haitham Manna of the International Coalition for Trying Israeli War Criminals told a news conference in Gaza city.
At first, a French lab “asked us to obtain license from Ukraine because they believed the samples were obtained from a place hit by Chernobyl accident due to the high amount of Uranium that were found,” Manna told Xinhua.
“We provided the labs with GPS (Global Positioning System) coordinates for the cites and images from the scenes where we collected the samples,” he added.
The samples were collected from the Gaza Strip after Israel ended a three-week offensive on Jan. 18 to check if they contained prohibited weapons.
Some of the results that French, Italian and British labs released showed that “the amount of depleted uranium in the areas of the samples were more than 75 tons and this is a very dangerous percentage for the overcrowded places in Gaza,” Manna said.