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Cluster Bombs Continue to Destroy Lives in Lebanon

LACD Staff Article

In the Fall of 2007, our staff attended an event in Congress held by the Mennonite Central Committee to address the dangers of cluster bombs and their impact on the lives and wellbeing of people who live in areas littered with them. Two attendees from Lebanon discussed their personal losses as the result of cluster bombs, and urged congressional staff to take more serious steps to ban the use of such weapons in war and conflict.

One of the speakers, Raed Mokaled, who lives in southern Lebanon told his personal story. Raed lost his son in 1999 due to a cluster bomb that the little boy came across while picnicking with the family in an open field. The story of Raed’s son is one of several that have increased in frequency ever since the 2006 July War between Israel and Lebanon. According to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, in an article dating back to December 2006, Israel “fired around 1,800 cluster bombs, containing over 1.2 million cluster bomblets.” Haaretz obtained this information through an interview with the head of an Israeli Defense Forces rocket head unit who was quoting his battalion commander. The United Nations has also reported that almost this entire number of cluster bombs was dropped over southern Lebanon in the last 72 hours of the war.

Human Rights Watch addressed this matter during the course of the war, when it warned against the use of such weapons in populated areas, which is the case in southern Lebanon. The Executive Director of Human Rights Watch, Kenneth Roth, told the press that “cluster munitions are unacceptably inaccurate and unreliable weapons when used around civilians,” and that “they should never be used in populated areas.”

In a special report by the Washington Post posted in 2007, the US Department of Defense shared its belief that “the bombs work well against enemy troop formations and armored vehicles, but the civilian toll can be dire. Once dropped, the munitions scatter hundreds of bomblets randomly over a wide area, many of which fail to explode and linger on as de facto landmines.”

The latest statistics on the number of casualties from cluster bombs dropped by Israeli forces in the July 2006 war appeared in a February 2008 Middle East Online article. The article reported that the number of deaths has reached 40, while the number of wounded has reached 218.

According to an article published by Reuters in late December, the Israelis claim that those bombs have only been dropped on military zones, while the United Nations contends that many of these bombs have been found in villages and homes that were targeted during the July 2006 war. The Christian Science Monitor has also featured in a February 2007 article stories of villagers and farmers in southern Lebanon who have been hurt by bombs found in the wreckage of their destroyed homes post-conflict, as well as in farmland and private property. The fear of cluster bombs has been widespread in southern Lebanon, particularly amongst farmers, which has in turn greatly affected the agricultural sector in that region.

The UN has assigned several teams of deminers who continue to work in southern Lebanon. The CSM article described this effort as “tedious” because it requires “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.”

With this demining effort and the widespread campaign to raise awareness on the harmful and deadly effects of cluster bombs, the number of wounded and deaths has been in decline. Despite this effort however, there is still a great deal of demining left to do, and the danger is still imminent. The latest statement by UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon, underscored this dangerous situation when he pointed out to the presence of 800 identified locations of cluster bombs in southern Lebanon that stretch over an area of 38 million square meters, and which impacts the lives of “30 percent of the citizens of southern Lebanon.”

To learn more about the Mennonite Central Committees campaign against the use of cluster bombs, please click here.

Lebanese American Council for Democracy
601 Pennsylvania Ave, NW
Suite 900 South Building
Washington, DC 20004