ISRAEL'S TEAR-GAS OFFENSIVE

Hart, Kathleen

Israel's Tear-Gas Offensive It's made in the U.S.A. BY KATHLEEN HART Buried in the daily litany of beatings and shootings on the West Bank and Gaza are reports of another cause of death among...

...all had been gassed...
...Tear gas is a misnomer for poison gas," says Dr...
...The women were in the final months of their pregnancy...
...Fine, who documented two deaths and several cases of blindness in Korea from tear-gas exposure...
...It was a Friday, and there must have been more than 400 women praying in the mosque," she recalls...
...In 1985, the United States banned the sale of tear gas to South Korea's police forces, citing their poor record on human rights...
...But when used in confined spaces, CS (ortho-chlorobenzylidene malonitrile) and CN (omega-chloroacetophenone) tear gas can cause serious injury and death, studies have shown...
...Tear gas is generally considered to have only limited, transient effects when used properly and out of doors...
...Gene Sharp, who directs the program on nonviolent sanctions at the Harvard University Center for International Affairs, was in Israel in mid-February...
...Members of a delegation to the region in January, led by Representative Mervyn Dymally, Democrat of California, found a canister in Gaza marked Made in USA...
...Hu says...
...Conditions imposed by the Israeli government in the Occupied Territories hamper attempts to confirm the cause of deaths and miscarriages among Palestinians exposed to tear gas...
...medical personnel from both the United States and the United Nations are often denied access by the Israeli Defense Forces, and Palestinians involved in collecting detailed medical documentation have been subjected to illegal administrative detention...
...In Shu'sat Refugee Camp, they gassed three days in a row," says Rana, who withholds her last name for fear of Israeli retaliation...
...There is a precedent for calling a halt to the sale of U.S...
...Rana herself was gassed while praying in the Dome of the Rock mosque in late January...
...John Hiddles-ton, a physician and UNRWA's director of health, has reportedly been examining the medical files of women who suffered miscarriages after being gassed...
...officials are concerned about the Israeli use of tear gas...
...Canisters of tear gas manufactured at Federal Laboratories in Saltsburg, Pennsylvania, have been retrieved from inside mosques, hospitals, homes, and schools in the Occupied Territories...
...Jonathan Fine, executive director of the Boston-based Physicians for Human Rights and former director of public health for the city of Boston, studied the effects of tear gas in South Korea last summer...
...in the March 1987 issue of The Progressive...
...She adds that she knows of a boy from Ama'rri camp in Ramallah who died after being gassed...
...And UNRWA health workers have begun an epidemiological study of women who have miscarried late in their pregnancy after exposure to tear gas...
...But medical experts cannot prove that exposure to CS tear gas can cause miscarriages or intrauterine fetal death...
...Soldiers were shooting tear gas into buildings in the old city of Jerusalem," Sharp recalls...
...After I got outside the tears and choking lasted about ten minutes...
...ban on sales of tear gas to Israel...
...There is no question that tear gas is being used improperly by the Israeli army," Dr...
...It's "standard" practice for Israeli soldiers to fire tear gas into dwellings, he says...
...The group has also sent letters to President Reagan and Secretary of State George Shultz asserting that Israeli misuse of tear gas against a civilian population violates the Arms Export Control Act and urging a U.S...
...Another group of obstetricians had seen forty at their clinic alone and placed estimates of late-term fetal deaths in the Gaza as high as eighty" in the first two months of the uprising...
...Amnesty International is also examining the evidence...
...In fact, Israeli troops have repeatedly fired canisters of tear gas into homes, schools, hospitals, and mosques since the Palestinian uprising began on December 9, 1987...
...BY KATHLEEN HART Buried in the daily litany of beatings and shootings on the West Bank and Gaza are reports of another cause of death among Palestinians under Israeli occupation: tear gas...
...It's quite plausible that the elderly and those with chronic respiratory conditions could die from inhalation of CS gas thrown into a small room," Dr...
...On April 14, The New York Times reported the death of Wadfah Farraj Allah, a seventy-year-old woman who, according to the Israeli army, suffocated after inhaling gas from a canister thrown into her Gaza Strip home...
...Clinics and hospitals in the Occupied Territories recorded thirty-two deaths from exposure to tear gas as of March 19, according to Abdeen Jabara, president of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee...
...On April 14, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) issued a statement expressing alarm about the hundreds of refugees being treated in UNRWA clinics for severe effects of tear-gas inhalation...
...The Act states that the use of American military hardware is authorized "solely for internal security, for legitimate self-defense," and other limited purposes consistent with the U.N...
...they generally have neither the time nor the technical facilities to perform blood-gas analyses on blood samples of gas victims...
...Recent reports show that nobody died of tear gas," said a spokeswoman for the Israeli embassy in Washington on April 22...
...It is a poison that will kill people if used in an enclosed space, or even in close alleyways...
...Rana, a West Bank resident and member of the Union of Palestinian Working Women's Committees, says Israeli troops fire canisters of gas into small houses and narrow alleys of the refugee camps, in some cases on a daily basis...
...We have received a great deal of information about the use of tear gas by Israeli troops and are seriously studying the documentation," says David Aasen, a member of Amnesty's Washington staff...
...She wrote "Is Mother's Milk Safe...
...Hospital staffs,have been overwhelmed by thousands of casualties from beatings and shootings...
...The burning on my skin lasted a longer time, and I had pains in my throat and stomach on and off for nearly two weeks...
...After the soldiers had moved on, I watched as children were brought out by adults crying and choking...
...Early in the spring, the Israeli government acknowledged that two Palestinians had been killed by tear gas...
...But it soon changed its position...
...He heard some troubling figures from senior obstetricians at hospitals and clinics in Gaza...
...January to remove dead fetuses from Palestinian women who had been gassed by Israeli troops, according to the DataBase Project...
...It warns that the product is "for outdoor use only...
...There's zero information as to whether CS is a reproductive hazard," Hu says...
...Five operations were performed at Shifa Hospital in Gaza one night in midKathleen Hart is a free-lance medical and science writer in Philadelphia...
...tear gas to governments that misuse it...
...U.N...
...She added that the two deaths had been checked and were actually from pneumonia and old age...
...One obstetrician saw seven cases of third-trimester fetal deaths in one day," Geiger recalls...
...The West Bank and Gaza have been sealed off from the media...
...According to news reports, Israeli troops have fired tear gas into several hospitals, including Shifa Hospital in Gaza, Mak-assad Hospital in East Jerusalem, and the U.N.-run Swedish hospital in Gaza, where staff members and patients were also assaulted by soldiers...
...charter...
...By its own admission, the South Korean government used more than 350,000 canisters of CS tear gas in its major cities during the month of June 1987...
...Literature from Federal Laboratories, a U.S...
...On the night of March 7, eleven cases of fetal deaths were reported in hospitals and clinics from four sites in Gaza...
...I felt like I was going to suffocate...
...Howard Hu, a physician who specializes in environmental medicine at the Harvard School of Public Health, joined Fine in his studies in Korea last summer...
...The Physicians for Human Rights have called for a ban on the Israeli use of tear gas in the Occupied Territories...
...H. Jack Geiger, a physician and professor of community medicine at City University of New York Medical School, was one of four American doctors from Physicians for Human Rights to visit the Occupied Territories in mid-February...
...The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee has appealed to Trans-Technology Corporation of Los Angeles, the parent company of Federal Laboratories, to suspend shipments of CS and CN tear gas to Israel...
...There was the beginning of a protest march outside, and the soldiers threw the canisters inside the mosque...
...Geiger says...
...Equally disturbing are reports of high rates of third-trimester fetal deaths among pregnant women in Gaza as a result of tear-gas exposure...
...By April 13, reports from Chicago's DataBase Project on Palestinian Human Rights put the death toll from tear gas at forty-one Palestinians, including eighteen infants under five months old and eight persons over sixty-five...
...The House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on the Middle East is looking into reports of Israeli misuse of tear gas and plans to hold a hearing on the issue...
...Doctors have speculated that fetal death might result either from a lack of oxygen to the fetus or from the toxic metabolites—such as cyanide—produced in the chemical breakdown of CS...
...Infants, the elderly, and persons with heart conditions or respiratory ailments are particularly vulnerable to death or serious injury from CS tear gas...
...When questioned about miscarriages caused by tear gas, a spokeswoman for the Israeli embassy said that new statistics on miscarriages in Gaza show that "the slight increase in rates between this year and last year is due only to the growth in the population...
...manufacturer of CS tear gas, stipulates that tear-gas canisters "must not be fired directly at persons, as death or injury may result...
...I couldn't breathe and my skin was burning...

Vol. 52 • June 1988 • No. 6


 
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