Use of Incendiary Weapons

The use of a weapon, such as napalm or an incendiary munition containing white phosphorus, primarily designed to set fire to an object or to cause burn injury to a person through flame, heat, or a combination of the two, restricted under Protocol III of the 1980 United Nations Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons, which prohibits or narrowly limits the use of air-delivered incendiary weapons against a target within a concentration of civilians. The convention was adopted in significant part because of the documented severe and often permanently disfiguring burn injuries incendiary weapons cause to civilians, and a number of states, including the United States, have entered reservations narrowing their own commitments under Protocol III, while documented use of incendiary weapons in populated areas has continued to draw international humanitarian law criticism in a number of more recent armed conflicts.