Another bogus charge relates to Israel's use of white phosphorus, an incendiary material that is used in small amounts in smoke shells designed to shield ground operations. If you are a casual consumer of news articles like this one you would think that by deploying white phosphorous (Willy Pete in U.S. military slang), Israel has committed a war crime. Actually it is a perfectly legal weapon. Here is what globalsecurity.org, a nonpartisan website, has to say on the subject:
White phosphorus is not banned by any treaty to which the United States is a signatory. … The use of white phosphorus or fuel air explosives are not prohibited or restricted by Protocol III of the Certain Conventional Weapons Convention (CCWC), the Convention on Prohibitions or Restrictions on the Use of Certain Conventional Weapons which may be Deemed to be Excessively Injurious or to have Indiscriminate Effects, which regulates the use of "any weapon or munition which is primarily designed to set fire to objects or to cause burn injury to persons . . ."
The only legal restriction on the use of white phosphorous comes from the 1980 Geneva Protocol III Prohibitions or Restrictions on the Use of Incendiary Weapons. Neither Israel nor the U.S. are parties to the convention, but their armed forces nevertheless observe its terms under what is known as "customary international law."
As suggested above, Protocol III allows white phosphorous to be used to create smoke. It doesn't allow it to be used directly against a civilian population. It goes on to say that: "It is further prohibited to make any military objective located within a concentration of civilians the object of attack by means of incendiary weapons other than air-delivered incendiary weapons, except when such military objective is clearly separated from the concentration of civilians and all feasible precautions are taken with a view to limiting the incendiary effects to the military objective and to avoiding, and in any event to minimizing, incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians and damage to civilian objects."
I suspect the same sort of thing applies to depleted uranium. It's OK to use it in munitions to give them added penetrating power, but not to pack it around a warhead in order to create a dirty bomb. (Never mind that there are other substances much better suited to making dirty bombs.)
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