Thousands of items of unexploded ordnance, in particular cluster munitions, pose a serious threat to the war torn population of Lebanon and are killing and injuring civilians daily. This is the warning of the United Nation's humanitarian coordinator in Lebanon, David Shearer.
Figure 1.
A field manager from the Mine Advisory Group investigates a cluster bomblet found in Tibnin, southern Lebanon
Credit: SERGEI POMONAREV/AP
Since the ceasefire, one person is killed and three people are injured a day by ordnance of all types, Mr Shearer said.
As of 30 August, a total of 61 people had been affected by ordnance, 13 killed and 48 injured, mostly from cluster munitions, according to UN figures.
Mr Shearer said that the most dangerous and most threatening are the more than 100 000 unexploded cluster “bomblets” dropped in the last days of the war in towns and in the countryside in southern Lebanon.
The scattered bomblets are also posing a serious obstacle to refugees who fled the fighting who are now returning to their houses and fields. Unlike antipersonnel mines, cluster munitions are not subject to a global ban.
The UN High Commissioner for Refugees has entered into partnership with the UN Mine Action Service to expedite the clearing of unexploded munitions and speed the return of refugees.
“These bombs are extremely dangerous because they are very unstable and can be set off merely by vibration,” Mr Shearer said. He added that they had so far discovered more than 400 sites where cluster bombs had been used.
The cluster munitions used by the Israeli armed forces in the conflict are estimated to have a failure rate of 40%, and other ordnance, such as artillery shells, mortars, and bombs, have a failure rate of about 10%, experts say.
More than 100 people from the UN's mine action coordination cell, part of the UN Mine Action Service, are in Lebanon, and they have destroyed more than 2900 submunitions.
Simon Conway, a British expert in clearing mines and director of the advocacy group Landmine Action, said that “the scale of cluster munition contamination is much greater than we've seen in Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq,” according to experts on the ground in Lebanon.
But UN officials and experts fear that the number of casualties of unexploded bombs could continue to rise. They are increasing the identification, marking, and clearance of affected sites. They are also launching training in mine awareness for children.
The UN coordinator says that clearing the cluster bombs could take up to 15 months.
However, Mr Conway, who has cleared mines elsewhere, said, “I'm afraid it will not take a year to clear. We'll be clearing cluster munitions from the rubble of the villages of southern Lebanon for another decade. That's the grim reality.”
Mr Shearer said that the $940m (£490m; €730m) raised at the Lebanon recovery donor conference on 31 August—almost twice what government was looking for—was an important “moral boost” for the Lebanese government.