Israeli army conducts weapon testing on animals

JERUSALEM

The Israeli military secretly conducted hundreds of weapons development experiments on animals, Israeli newspaper Yedioth Aharonoth reported on Sunday.

Around 1,000 experiments were conducted by the Israeli Defense Ministry on different types of animals during the past three years, the daily said, citing a document from the "Let the Animals Live" association.

According to the document, the Israeli army used the animals to simulate a naval incident of multiple victims.

The pigs were the most used for the medical experiments due to its heart and respiratory system structure similarity with the humans, the document showed.

The daily said the Defense Ministry used some of the experiments to test their body reaction on an explosion and the aerosol explosion.

The Israeli military maintains that it slightly uses experiments on animals only for medical researches and under supervision of qualified veterinarian.

*Ahmed Asmar contributed to this report from Ankara