Lebanese Fields Sown with Israeli Cluster Bombs

Deadly Harvest

By PATRICK COCKBURN

Nabatiyeh, Lebanon.

The war in Lebanon has not ended. Every day, some of the million bomblets which were fired by Israeli artillery during the last three days of the conflict kill four people in southern Lebanon and wound many more.

The casualty figures will rise sharply in the next month as villagers begin the harvest, picking olives from trees whose leaves and branches hide bombs that explode at the smallest movement. Lebanon's farmers are caught in a deadly dilemma: to risk the harvest, or to leave the produce on which they depend to rot in the fields.

In a coma in a hospital bed in Nabatiyeh lies Hussein Ali Ahmad, a 70-year-old man from the village of Yohmor. He was pruning an orange tree outside his house last week when he dislodged a bomblet; it exploded, sending pieces of shrapnel into his brain, lungs and kidneys. "I know he can hear me because he squeezes my hand when I talk to him," said his daughter, Suwad, as she sat beside her father's bed in the hospital.

At least 83 people have been killed by cluster munitions since the ceasefire, according to independent monitors.

Some Israeli officers are protesting at the use of cluster bombs, each containing 644 small but lethal bomblets, against civilian targets in Lebanon. A commander in the MLRS (multiple launch rocket systems) unit told the Israeli daily Haaretz that the army had fired 1,800 cluster rockets, spraying 1.2 million bomblets over houses and fields. "In Lebanon, we covered entire villages with cluster bombs," he said. "What we did there was crazy and monstrous." What makes the cluster bombs so dangerous is that 30 per cent of the bomblets do not detonate on impact. They can lie for years - often difficult to see because of their small size, on roofs, in gardens, in trees, beside roads or in rubbish - waiting to explode when disturbed.

In Nabatiyeh, the modern 100-bed government hospital has received 19 victims of cluster bombs since the end of the war. As we arrived, a new patient, Ahmad Sabah, a laboratory technician at the hospital, was being rushed into the emergency room. A burly man of 45, he was unconscious on a stretcher. Earlier in the morning, he had gone up to the flat roof of his house to check the water tank. While there, he must have touched a pile of logs he was keeping for winter fires. Unknown to him, a bomblet had fallen into the woodpile a month earlier. The logs shielded him from the full force of the blast, but when we saw him, doctors were still trying to find out the extent of his injuries.

"For us, the war is still going on, though there was a cease-fire on 14 August," said Dr Hassan Wazni, the director of the hospital. "If the cluster bombs had all exploded at the time they landed, it would not be so bad, but they are still killing and maiming people."

The bomblets may be small, but they explode with devastating force. On the morning of the ceasefire, Hadi Hatab, an 11-year old boy, was brought dying to the hospital. "He must have been holding the bomb close to him," Dr Wazni said. "It took off his hands and legs and the lower part of his body."

We went to Yohmor to find where Hussein Ali Ahmad had received his terrible wounds while pruning his orange tree. The village is at the end of a broken road, six miles south of Nabatiyeh, and is overlooked by the ruins of Beaufort Castle, a crusader fortress on a ridge above the deep valley along which the Litani river runs.

Israeli bombs and shells have turned about a third of the houses in Yohmor into concrete sandwiches, one floor falling on top of another under the impact of explosions. Some families camp in the ruins. Villagers said that they were most worried by the cluster bombs still infesting their gardens, roofs and fruit trees. In the village street, were the white vehicles of the Manchester-based Mines Advisory Group (MAG), whose teams are trying to clear the bomblets.

It is not an easy job. Whenever members of one of the MAG teams finds and removes a bomblet, they put a stick, painted red on top and then yellow, in the ground. There are so many of these sticks that it looks as if some sinister plant had taken root and is flourishing in the village.

"The cluster bombs all landed in the last days of the war," said Nuhar Hejazi, a surprisingly cheerful 65-year-old woman. "There were 35 on the roof of our house and 200 in our garden so we can't visit our olive trees." People in Yohmor depend on their olive trees and the harvest should begin now before the rains, but the trees are still full of bomblets. "My husband and I make 20 cans of oil a year which we need to sell," Mrs Hejazi says. "Now we don't know what to do." The sheer number of the bomblets makes it almost impossible to remove them all.

Frederic Gras, a de-mining expert formerly in the French navy, who is leading the MAG teams in Yohmor, says: "In the area north of the Litani river, you have three or four people being killed every day by cluster bombs. The Israeli army knows that 30 per cent of them do not explode at the time they are fired so they become anti-personnel mines."

Why did the Israeli army do it? The number of cluster bombs fired must have been greater than 1.2 million because, in addition to those fired in rockets, many more were fired in 155mm artillery shells. One Israeli gunner said he had been told to "flood" the area at which they were firing but was given no specific targets. M. Gras, who personally defuses 160 to 180 bomblets a day, says this is the first time he seen cluster bombs used against heavily populated villages.

An editorial in Haaretz said that the mass use of this weapon by the Israeli Defence Forces was a desperate last-minute attempt to stop Hizbollah's rocket fire into northern Israel. Whatever the reason for the bombardment, the villagers in south Lebanon will suffer death and injury from cluster bombs as they pick their olives and oranges for years to come.

Patrick Cockburn is the author of 'The Occupation: War, resistance and daily life in Iraq', to be published by Verso in October.

Israel urged to give more info on bombs

By ALFRED de MONTESQUIOU, Associated Press WriterTue Sep 19, 2:22 PM ET

The United Nations on Tuesday urged Israel to hand over detailed information about cluster munitions it used in Lebanon during the war with Hezbollah, saying at least 350,000 unexploded bomblets still pose a deadly risk.

In southern villages like this, experts are removing undetonated bomblets from houses, yards and fields. On one recent day, villagers looked on warily as Tony Wyles, part of a U.N. team, inspected a small cluster bomb at the foot of a fig tree.

"Every bomb is a challenge. You don't know why it didn't explode ... the slightest movement can trigger it," Wyles said as he carefully picked up the bomblet — a metal cylinder half the size of a soda can that could kill anyone within 60 feet.

He cautiously slid a layer of tape between the bomb's trigger and explosive charge, temporarily disarming it for detonation later.

The U.N. humanitarian coordinator for Lebanon, David Shearer, said Israel could accelerate the work by providing exact details on where it fired used cluster munitions — aerial bombs and artillery shells that spray out dozens or hundreds of bomblets over a wide area.

"What we'd like is the number of shells that were fired in, and the actual coordinates, so we can go in and short-circuit what we're doing now and go and find those munitions straight away. But that has not happened yet," Shearer said in Beirut.

Israeli government spokeswoman Miri Eisin said she was unaware of any official U.N. complaint or request for further details.

Dalya Farran of the U.N. Mine Action Coordination Center said Israel has given the U.N. center some maps of cluster bomb strikes. "But they're useless. They don't have any coordinates or legend," Farran said from the southern city of Tyre.

During the 34-day war, Israel used cluster bombs to attack Hezbollah fighters, who often launch rockets at Israel from civilian neighborhoods in southern Lebanon.

No international treaties or laws forbid the use of cluster bombs, but the Geneva Conventions outline rules to protect civilians. Because the bomblets often maim civilians after fighting ends, human rights groups have criticized Israel for using them against targets in cities and towns. Israel says all the weapons it uses are legal under international law.

At least 15 people, including a child, have been killed by cluster bombs in the month since the Aug. 14 cease-fire, the U.N. said Tuesday. Eighty-three more have been wounded.

U.N. teams have identified 516 cluster bomb strike locations and cleared 17,000 bomblets. They say clearing all the unexploded bombs could take two years.

Fired by a howitzer or dropped from an aircraft, each cluster bomb can release hundreds of bomblets in the air that are supposed to explode on impact. The failure rate in Lebanon, though, was around 30 percent to 40 percent and the density of cluster munitions in south Lebanon is higher than in Kosovo or Iraq, the U.N. said.

Lying in the intensive care unit of a hospital in Tyre with a broken and burned leg, 22-year-old shepherd Mohammed Hassan was recovering from stepping a bomblet.

"All I remember is being catapulted several meters (yards) into the air," he said of a bomblet near a path between his family's farm and the chicken house where he had gone to fetch eggs.

"Just before fainting, I felt down to my leg and thought, "Thank God, it's still there," he said. His other foot was also injured, as were both his hands.

Farran said the task force has about 100 deminers at work. They coordinate with the Lebanese army and the U.N. peacekeeping force in south Lebanon, which also have demining teams.

The task force worries that rain in the coming months will sweep bomblets downhill to contaminate new areas, or cover them with a thin layer of dirt that will make them invisible.

The U.N. has harshly criticized Israel for using cluster bombs, especially in the last hours before the cease-fire. The State Department has said it is investigating whether Israel misused American-made cluster bombs.

Wyles said his team's search around Majdal Sellem focused on removing the most immediately dangerous bomblets from houses and gardens. Later, another team would have to inspect the village and surrounding fields inch by inch.

"I've never seen so many cluster bombs in a civilian area," said Wyles, a 17-year British army veteran who has worked in 24 countries.

The five bomblets found that morning were too dangerous to carry far. Deminers took them to an area of the village where houses had been flattened by bombs, dug a small hole and put them in the earth before blowing them up.

Though the bombs were also covered by sandbags, the controlled explosion sent dirt flying more than 50 yards.

How sad that these people be made to suffer long after the invasion is over.

And the legality is being questioned, "The director of Human Rights Watch, Kenneth Roth, has warned that cluster bombs with high failure rates "effectively become anti-personnel landmines", and that their use in civilian areas breaks a legal ban on indiscriminate attacks."

Good link:

http://www.yirmeyahureview.com/articles/us_clustermunitions.htm

Here's an excerpt: "The legality of cluster weapons under International Humanitarian Law is questionable at best. Apologists for the use of these weapons rely upon legalistic interpretations that demonstrate their contempt for the spirit of the Geneva Conventions and other international treaties which seek to outlaw the use of indiscriminate weapons that inevitably cause undue harm to civilians. Groups which seek to ban the use of cluster weapons point out that unexploded submunitions are no different in nature than anti-personnel landmines. “The rationale that led the international community to stand with the survivors of landmine injuries and enact a ban on anti-personnel landmines,” the Mennonite Central Committee report observes, “also applies to cluster weapons.”[4] According to Human Rights Watch, “Submunition duds are more lethal than antipersonnel mines; incidents involving submunition duds are much more likely to cause death than injury.”[5]"

MOre:

http://www.stopclustermunitions.org/

More good info re: cluster munitions:

http://www.hrw.org/doc/?t=arms_clusterbombs

Why is Israel is threatening Lebanon with re-newed attacks, as well as trying to re-occupy Lebanon under the UN flag?