The fact that most of them are wounded in the upper body or head is a positive thing. After a flurry of international condemnation, the rate of head and chest injuries dropped, replaced by devastating leg and abdomen wounds. There's no question in my mind that this was a very conscious military decision to use this weapon to wound people as a form of intimidation of the population. And as a result, probably several thousand young Palestinian men will end up with permanent disabilities. The M16 ammunition was at first mistaken by Palestinian doctors for the dumdum bullet, banned by the Hague Convention in 1899.
Fragmentation does cause more wounds.
The weapon was introduced in 1963, as an experiment with the South Vietnamese army during the Kennedy administration. And the bullet fragmented more, causing multiple injuries from tiny pieces of lead, each on its own haywire path. The old dumdum had been banned from the battlefield, but now some worried that a new bullet, with similar consequences, was taking its place. For years, disputes over what actually caused the woundsthe bullet's velocity, its tumbling, its fragmentationslowed efforts to ban the ammunition. In 1995, the Swiss introduced an initiative to bring the M16 ammunition, along with others, under the umbrella of the Hague Convention.