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.
Lebanon: Israeli Cluster Munitions Threaten Civilians
Dangerous unexploded submunitions, duds that fail to detonate on impact but are still live and at risk of exploding, are present in areas of Nabatiyeh, Tabnine and Beit Yahoun, as well as areas adjacent to the 3km road connecting Tabnine and Beit Yahoun, U.N. demining officials said. They have been able to visit only a limited region so far, and fear that the 10 sites identified in the first two days could be the “tip of the iceberg.” U.N. teams have received reports of at least 16 casualties from cluster submunitions that exploded well after they had been fired, and they fear many more.
What does one call Foreign Occupation Forces conducting a Murderous Military Campaign, in anothers country, if we call those who Live in those Lands ‘Terrorists’ when they Fight Back That Occupation-Invasion??
Especially when countries like the U.S. and Israel use ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’, such as ‘Cluster Bombs’, supplied to Israel by the United States by the way, designed to Inflict Maximum Casulties!
A bit of U.S. history of there use:
Despite their acknowledged threat to civilians, cluster bombs have already been used in Operation Allied Force. Both the U.S. and Britain have acknowledged using cluster bombs. . .
Though probably no more than a few hundred air-delivered cluster bombs have been used to date in Yugoslavia, there reportedly already have been civilian casualties. A NATO airstrike involving cluster bombs on an airfield in Nis on May 7 went off target, hitting a hospital complex and adjoining civilian areas. On April 24, five boys were reported to have been killed and two injured when what was evidently a cluster bomb submunition exploded near the village of Doganovic, fifteen kilometers from Urosevac in southern Kosovo. The munition was described as having a yellow-colored jacket, identical to that of the CBU-87 or RBL755 bomblets.
During the 1991 Gulf War, the United States and its allied coalition dropped bombs containing about twenty million submunitions, and also reportedly fired artillery projectiles containing more than thirty million submunitions. These resulted in millions of hazardous duds, each functioning like an indiscriminate antipersonnel landmine. At least eighty U.S. casualties during the war were attributed to cluster munition duds. More than 4,000 civilians have been killed or injured by cluster munition duds since the end of the war.
U.S. military sources have told Human Rights Watch that the Air Force began dropping cluster bombs within a matter of days.
During the first week of the campaign, it is believed that Air Force B-1 bombers dropped 50 CBU-87 cluster bombs in some five missions. CBU-87 cluster bomb use has continued after the first week, and it is believed that other airplanes joined B-1s in dropping cluster bombs on both fixed and mobile targets. . .
United Nations officials have stated that on October 22 U.S. cluster bomb submunitions landed on the village of Shaker Qala, near the city of Herat in western Afghanistan,
killing nine civilians and injuring fourteen. The head of the United Nations Mine Action Program in Afghanistan (U.N. MAPA) noted that villagers are afraid to leave their homes after encountering the yellow soda can-like objects characteristic of CBU-87 submunitions that were left scattered in the village after an air strike on a nearby military camp.
He called upon the United States to provide information on the types of ordnance dropped on Shaker Qala and elsewhere. . .On October 25, the U.S. for the first time publicly acknowledged using cluster bombs. In response to a media question, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Richard Myers said, “Yes, we have used cluster bomb units.. There have not been a great number of them used, but they have been used.”
U.S. ground forces, particularly the Army, also used cluster munitions near populated areas, with predictable loss of civilian life. After roughly a quarter of the civilian deaths in the 1999 NATO bombing of Yugoslavia were caused by the use of cluster bombs in populated areas, the U.S. Air Force substantially curtailed the practice.
But the U.S. Army apparently never absorbed this lesson.
In responding to Iraqi attacks as they advanced through Iraq, Army troops regularly used cluster munitions in populated areas, causing substantial loss of life. Such disregard for civilian life is incompatible with a genuinely humanitarian intervention.
U.S., British and Dutch aircraft dropped more than 1,765 cluster bombs containing more than 295,000 cluster bomblets during the NATO air campaign in Yugoslavia from March to June 1999. During Operation Allied Force, the U.S. dropped about 1,100 CBU-87s (each containing 202 submunitions), the United Kingdom dropped about 500 RBL-755 cluster bombs (each containing 147 submunitions), and the Netherlands dropped 165 CBU-87s.
And abit of information on ‘Cluster Bombs’:
Human Rights Watch Cluster Munition Information Chart
Cluster Munition Questions and Answers: The M26 Rocket
