Cluster bombs: a war's perilous aftermath

One of Israel's own probes into the conduct of the general staff found last month that the war was "carried out with no clear objective," according to an account of remarks about the probe by Dan Shomron to a Knesset committee, as reported in the Haaretz newspaper.

The former chief of staff said that Israeli forces could not "translate into a military operation the instructions given by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to prevent rockets from being fired at Israel."

With just days left in the conflict, Israel asked for expedited delivery of 1,300 bombs of a US version which carries 644 comblets each.

The result of the final flurry of Israeli cluster-bomb strikes – the UN has recorded 841 "strike locations" so far – is clear on the steep slopes of the village of Hallousieh, 10 miles northeast of Tyre, where limestone outcroppings punctuate rows of aged olive trees.

The deminers call this site CBU-362, where they have found 728 items after three months of work.

It is tedious work, picking through green weeds or bramble for tennis-ball-sized bomblets that can explode with the slightest touch. Most are resting where they fall, with upwards of a 70 percent dud rate. But metal detectors are required: one bomblet discovered last week had buried itself a foot underground on impact.

"As we were clearing, farmers did their harvest, coming in behind us," says Neil Arnold, a BACTEC site supervisor and former Royal Engineer in the British Army. The area is also rife with impacts of regular ordnance, though traces of any Hizbullah target have long since disappeared.

"[The Israelis] were targeting something, but we do not know what it was," says Mr. Arnold, as Lebanese deminers set up search lanes with tape, and carefully dig up every item that sets off the yellow-wand metal detectors.

These men continue outward in a 50-yard radius from the last cluster munition that they find.

Deminers have already found nearly 100,000 bomblets since August, and – calculating a rate of 55 teams, working 20 days a month at 3,000 square yards per day – hope to have most of the clearing done by the end of this year. The total cost is estimated to be $40 million.

But the human cost is high, too, despite saturation efforts to warn southern Lebanese returning to homes vacated during the war to take care, don't touch, and to report any unmarked munitions. Israeli officials argue that the absence of civilians in these villages when they actually fired the cluster bombs at Hizbullah targets,makes their use legal.

The education effort has cut the number of casualties from five or six per day last August, when hundreds of thousands of civilians returned to homes and fields carpeted with bomblets, to just two or three a week.

Caught in the middle are families like Rasha's, which is so poor that it had not been able to buy crutches for their daughter a month after the explosion.

In a room with virtually bare walls, the blast hole in the wall – and outward spray of shrapnel around and on the ceiling – has not yet been plastered and painted over.

That reminder that has not helped Mrs. Salman quell her fears, or her nightmares.

"My life, and the life of my daughter: It is very difficult to face how it was, and how is has become," says Salman. "I see so many horrific bad dreams... It doesn't go out of my mind. My son woke me this morning, and I was crying in my dreams."

Rasha herself has been antsy, still in bed in the living room when she wants to be outside with her friends playing. She's been promised a prosthetic limb in seven months.

"My life has changed, and I hope it will improve," says Rasha. Fortunately, she adds, one of her favorite pastimes does not depend on use of her legs: "I like to draw."

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