When the Goldstone Report gave chilling details of the devastation and human suffering in Gaza, our elected representatives in Washington quickly repudiated it.
How to Tell a War Crime When You See One
Chuck Yates/ LA Progressive
https://www.laprogressive.com/war-and-peace/white-phosphorus
(May 22, 2026) — Willy Pete, we called it — military cutespeak for white phosphorus, a horrific incendiary weapon. It ignites instantly when exposed to oxygen. As long as it has air, it keeps burning until it’s used up, at temperatures as high as 4,500 degrees Fahrenheit. And it sticks. You can’t wipe it off, or wash it off. It stops burning under water, but reignites when it gets air again. Get it on you, it’s on you until it’s done burning, and there’s nothing you can do but hope it burns out quickly, before it eats you alive.
It’s a weapon-lover’s weapon, and some claim it has legitimate tactical ueses, but its primary effect is to cause human suffering. It goes off like the best Fourth of July fireworks, blooming in long white streamers. Once you’ve seen it, you never mistake it. Once you’ve seen what it does to people, you never forget it.
Our own forces used it in Vietnam to expose and burn out Vietnamese opponents, even in villages, surrounded by civilians. The only way to get them was to risk a lot of what we politely call “collateral damage.” But we had to get them, so we killed a lot of Vietnamese civilians, not just with bullets and bombs, but also with white phosphorus. What can I say? Sometimes you have to destroy the village in order to save it.
That was my war, but of course it wasn’t the last war. There was Iraq in 1991, Afghanistan in 2001, Iraq again in 2003, and if we can trust the embedded reporters, we used white phosphorus in those wars too. Then, in 2008, we watched from a safe distance as the Israeli Defense Force used white phosphorus in Gaza and southern Lebanon, in a ferocious assault they called Operation Cast Lead.
Hamas had been firing little homemade rockets out of Gaza. A fair percentage of them exploded. Some of them even did some damage. As anyone could see, the only way to put a stop to that nonsense was to let loose the most massive and comprehensive military violence against Palestinians since the destruction of the Jenin refugee camp during Operation Defensive Shield in 2002.
Of course, here at home we understood. It was Hamas, after all, and they were hiding in plain sight, among civilians. Instead of crying outrage, president-elect Obama said he’d defend his family if someone attacked them. I guess that’s as good a way as any to trivialize the indiscriminate killing of nearly fifteen hundred Palestinians, all but a few of them civilians.
White phosphorus bloomed in some of the photographs of Operation Cast Lead. But when the Goldstone Report gave chilling details of the devastation and human suffering in Gaza, our elected representatives in Washington quickly repudiated it. The report relied heavily on survivor testimony, they said, and we all know you can’t trust biased evidence like that.
Human rights agencies report that Israeli forces used white phosphorus in Gaza again, after the 2023 Hamas attack on Israel. One atrocity begets another, it seems. And now that the United States and Israel are making war on Iran, we hear that Israel has used it in southern Lebanon in its campaign to wipe out Hezbollah strongholds.
So far as we know, nobody has used it in Iran, yet. But the fog of war is really dense there, and the story changes almost daily. It’s impossible to know what’s actually happening, but sources report that Pete Hegseth recently prayed for “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy,” so anything is possible.
Sources define a war crime as a violation of the laws of war. If you look up “laws of war,” most likely you’ll find yourself reading about just war theory, which provides a tidy framework for keeping the fight fair. Not to belabor the point, but “laws of war” is an absurdity. Violence at the scale of war quickly escapes the constraints of both law and justice, and there are those who maintain that war itself is a crime.
Under any conditions, regardless of justifications, war is a violation of the laws of humanity, but we don’t hear about that very often. The constraints imposed by a concern for humanity are most inconvenient to the conduct of war. If we cared about the laws of humanity even a fraction as much as we care about waging wars, we would not permit ourselves to use a weapon like white phosphorus.
Of course, we can always mumble some justification like “exigent necessity” or “optimal efficacy,” but nothing can alter the fact that if we use white phosphorus, we’ve chosen to commit atrocity, to mutilate and kill human beings with unquenchable fire. There can be no appeal to the laws of humanity, to the laws of war, or to justice, after such a choice
Chuck Yates served in Vietnam in ’68, ’69, and ’70 with the Navy, holds a PhD from Princeton, and taught Asian history to college students from ’87 to ’25.
