HRRC demands that Israel immediately stop all use of artillery-fired white phosphorus munitions in populated residential areas. The deployment of these weapons risks indiscriminately harming civilians, thereby violating international law. We also call on states that provide Israel with weapons to stop supplying the country with white phosphorus munitions.
On Monday, March 9, the human rights organization Human Rights Watch (HRW) published a news release accusing Israel of unlawfully deploying munitions containing white phosphorus, a dangerous chemical substance, over civilian homes in Lebanon. According to images verified and geolocated by HRW, artillery-fired white phosphorus munitions were deployed on March 3 in a residential area of Yohmor, located in southern Lebanon, resulting in fires in at least two homes and one car.
White phosphorus can cause severe and extremely painful burns that are deep and slow to heal. The smoke can also irritate the eyes and respiratory tract, leading to a range of harmful health effects. It can take up to 24 hours for systemic effects to occur and, in severe cases of exposure, these effects can lead to death.
Although white phosphorus is not officially classified as a chemical weapon, munitions containing the substance may be considered incendiary weapons—weapons designed to start fires—and their use may violate international law in some circumstances.
Under Protocol III of the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW), an international treaty that regulates the use of weapons that pose excessive risks to civilians, it is prohibited to “make the civilian population as such, individual civilians or civilian objects the object of attack by incendiary weapons.” However, white phosphorus munitions often have other purposes, such as obscuring or marking targets, and may therefore not always be technically classified as incendiary weapons when used in warfare.