The health ministry in the Gaza Strip, which has come under an all-out Israeli war, has confirmed the regime’s deployment of banned white phosphorous munitions against a densely populated neighborhood in the coastal sliver.
“Israeli warplanes use internationally #prohibited_white_phosphorus, destroying al-Karama neighborhood,” the official Palestinian Wafa news agency wrote on X on Wednesday, referring to a neighborhood lying in the north of the Palestinian territory.
Calling up an unprecedented 300,000 reservists, the Israeli regime has declared a “long” war on Gaza in response to Operation al-Aqsa Storm.
Gaza’s Hamas and Islamic Jihad resistance movements initiated the operation on Saturday, killing hundreds of Israeli forces and illegal settlers and taking many others among them hostage. The resistance fighters say they waged the operation against the occupying regime in response to its decades-long campaign of bloodshed and destruction against Palestinians.
The Israeli war has so far killed 900 Palestinians, including 260 children and 230 women, and injured as many as 4,600 others.
Reporting on Monday, Iran’s Arabic-language al-Alam news network reported that the regime had started using the banned munitions against Gaza earlier in the day.
The use of white phosphorus shells for direct targeting of enemy positions is illegal under the international law as the practice can amount to war crime and cause widespread fatalities.
This is not the first time that Tel Aviv targets the territory with such weapons.
Israel admitted to “using munitions containing white phosphorus” during its 2008-2009 war on Gaza, but the regime denied violating the international law by insisting that such weapons were not fired into areas populated by civilians.
