Israeli cluster bombs blanket Lebanese towns

UN Emergency Relief Coordinator Jan Egeland reported on Wednesday that 359 separate cluster bomb strike locations have been found after demining teams surveyed almost 90 percent of affected Lebanese territory. Unexploded munitions cover entire towns, villages, and farmlands, particularly those in southern Lebanon. “It is an outrage that we have 100,000 unexploded bombs among where children, women, and civilians, and shopkeepers and farmers are now going to tread,” he declared. “I hear that there are people wounded every day, and people killed, if not every day then every other day.... Cluster bombs have affected large areas—lots of homes, lots of farmland, lots of commercial businesses and shops—and they will be with us for many, many months, possibly for years.”

Investigators in Lebanon have reported that the vast majority of the unexploded cluster bomblets were dropped in the last three days of the war. “What’s shocking and completely immoral is that 90 percent of the cluster bomb strikes occurred in the last 72 hours of the conflict, when we knew there would be a resolution and an end of this,” Egeland declared.

The timing of the cluster bombardment underscores the criminality of Israel’s offensive in Lebanon, and exposes the Olmert government’s lie that it avoided using cluster munitions in populated areas.

The Olmert government, in collaboration with the Bush administration, invaded Lebanon on July 13 in order to destroy Hezbollah and to reduce the country to a subordinated US-Israeli client state. As the war progressed, however, it became clear that the US and Israel were not achieving their objectives and that a major political and military setback loomed.

Read More
http://wsws.org/articles/2006/sep2006/leba-s01.shtml