Injuries in Lebanon revive bid to ban cluster bombs

Lurking danger only compounds the residual impact of the war, which killed about 1,200 people in Lebanon, mostly civilians. The Murtada family sat the fight out, unable to afford to leave.

"The kids are still terrified; they only have to see a plane to start crying and run and hide," he says.

Experts say Israel dropped about 4 million submunitions on Lebanon. More than a quarter failed to explode on impact and have effectively become a multitude of landmines. Human Rights Watch accused Hizbullah of firing cluster rockets into northern Israel, though to a lesser extent. The group denies the charge.

The bomblets are devastating rural southern Lebanon's economy, which relies on farming. Summer tobacco, wheat, and fruit rotted in the fields; the olive season is drawing to a close. Fear of the bomblets has stymied harvesting.

Banana plantations around Ras el-Ain have withered and dried. Red paint or red tape by the roadsides warns of those bombs that have been found so far.

"This season's gone," says Murtada, whose home looks out on the family olive groves that no one can enter. "Our economic situation's getting desperate. Even if the UN came now, it's too late – the olives are spoiling. It's the same for everyone in this area. We live off the land."

The UN says Israel has not provided vital information that would speed up clearance and south Lebanon's safety and recovery. "We have been asking for the grid references and how many were dropped, but we still haven't received them," Farran says.

Landmine Action, another campaigning group, also backed a total ban on the munitions in an October report, arguing that southern Lebanon proved international law was inadequate, despite users' protests that cluster bombs are legal if used outside civilian areas.

Some of the cluster bombs Israel dropped were Vietnam-era US supplies, increasing the lethal dud-rate, but Landmine Action dismissed arguments that using modern types would solve the problem, pointing out that one such make, the Israeli-made M85, currently littered southern Lebanon. "The massive and widespread use of cluster munitions across southern Lebanon does not seem to accord with any recognizable legitimate military strategy," it said.

Israel's widespread use of cluster bombs in civilian areas in its 1982 invasion of Lebanon prompted then-president Ronald Reagan to ban US sales of cluster bombs to its ally for six years, on the grounds it had broken bilateral agreements controlling their use. The State Department is investigating whether Israel's use of US-made cluster bombs this summer also breached such agreements.

Israel also used cluster bombs in Lebanon in 1978, 1996 and 2005, the residue of which still kill or maim two people a year, Handicap International said.

Amnesty International called for a ban on cluster munitions in an Opinion piece in The Christian Science Monitor in October.

"The human cost of using cluster bombs in this summer's conflict (in Lebanon) should provide enough impetus to abolish these indiscriminate killers once and for all," wrote Curt Goering, a senior deputy executive director at Amnesty International USA.

For now, Hassan says, his children are feeling the effects of the weapons detritus. "All the children are too scared to go out now, we just play on the main roads or in our houses," he says. "It's as if the war hasn't ended for us."

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