Israeli
Cluster Bombs
Blanket Lebanese Towns
By Rick Kelly
01 September 2006
World
Socialist Web
Unexploded
Israeli cluster munitions dropped during the 34-day war in Lebanon have
killed at least 13 civilians and wounded 50 since the ceasefire took
effect on August 14. About 100,000 unexploded cluster bomblets litter
the country, preventing large numbers of people from returning to their
homes. Israel’s bombardment of urban and residential areas with
cluster munitions was a deliberate tactic by the government of Prime
Minister Ehud Olmert to terrorise the Lebanese people and prevent refugees
from returning to their homes.
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.
Just hours before the UN
vote on a ceasefire on August 11, Israel poured thousands of troops
over the Lebanese border and launched a sustained artillery and missile
assault in a desperate attempt to improve its position ahead of the
ceasefire’s implementation. The Olmert government hoped that a
final three-day assault would at least ensure that southern Lebanon
would remain a depopulated “buffer zone”, patrolled by Israeli
forces.
According to the UN, 250,000
Lebanese civilians have been unable to return to their homes, either
because they were destroyed or because of the danger of unexploded ordinance.
In Beirut alone, it is estimated that 35,000 people remain homeless.
Tens of refugees are in other urban centres and in neighbouring Syria.
That the number of displaced people is not far higher is due only to
the Lebanese people’s determination not to be made into permanent
refugees and, like the Palestinians, lose their land to Israeli annexation.
Israel made every effort
to render southern Lebanon uninhabitable. “This is the worst [cluster
bomb contamination] I have ever seen,” Marc Garlasco, of Human
Rights Watch, told the Christian Science Monitor. “We’re
on the verge of a potential humanitarian crisis if the deminers can’t
get a handle on this.” Garlasco previously worked as a senior
Pentagon analyst and was responsible for recommending Iraqi targets
for bombing in the 2003 invasion. He described the US cluster bombing
of Iraq as “child’s play” compared to the situation
in Lebanon.
A Reuters report described
the situation in one southern Lebanese village, Yohmor: “When
a team from Mines Advisory Group first visited on the day after the
August 14 ceasefire, they found bomblets littering the ground from one
end of the village to the other. They were on the roofs of all the houses,
in all the gardens and across all the roads and paths. Some were inside
houses, after landing through the widows or through holes blasted in
the roof by artillery and aircraft. A lot of people returned right after
the ceasefire, but many of them quickly left again when they found their
homes reduced to rubble and covered in explosives.”
Children have been among
those killed and maimed by the bombs. Most unexploded cluster munitions
are round and about the size of a tennis ball. Curious children kicking
or picking up the munitions have suffered terrible wounds, including
amputated limbs.
On August 26, the Washington
Post reported the details of one case. Following the ceasefire, 10-year-old
Hassan Tehini returned with his family to their home in the southern
Lebanese town of Aita al-Shaab, and on August 17 he and his cousins
explored the remains of their town. “We wanted to see which houses
were destroyed,” he said. “The whole neighbourhood is broken.”
When a cousin found what he thought was a ball and threw it in the air,
the bomblet exploded in mid-air, causing Hassan’s intestines to
spill out. “I started screaming,” he told the Post. “The
bomb threw me two or three metres away. My legs, my clothes were soaked
in blood.”
Human rights organisations
and legal experts have condemned Israel for gross violations of international
law. “Cluster munitions, by their nature, can never discriminate
between civilian and military targets if used in residential areas,”
the UK-based human rights legal organisation, Public Interest Lawyers,
explained in a letter to the Guardian. “International humanitarian
law absolutely prohibits weapons systems that cannot discriminate between
civilian and military objectives.... If Israeli forces have used cluster
bombs in residential areas then they may be guilty of committing war
crimes, just as those who used cluster bombs in Baghdad and Basra.”
The US State Department last
week announced that it was investigating whether Israeli use of US-supplied
cluster bombs in residential areas breached agreements to only use the
weapons against open military targets. In 1982, Washington suspended
sales of cluster munitions to Israel for six years after the Zionist
state’s invasion of Lebanon provoked a congressional enquiry.
The State Department review
is nothing more than a sop to international outrage. The Bush administration
directly collaborated in Israel’s invasion as a means of extending
US domination of the Middle East and of placing further pressure on
Syria and Iran. Hoping to see the emergence of what Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice called a “new Middle East”, Washington
encouraged Israel to step up its destruction and for weeks blocked demands
for an immediate ceasefire. No less than the Olmert government and Israeli
Defence Forces command, leading officials in the Bush administration
should face war crimes charges for their actions in Lebanon.