UN official accuses Israel of ‘worst ever’ use of cluster bombs

The Sunday Herald
February 10, 2008

By Hugh Macleod
Tyre, south Lebanon

On the morning of the cease fire, 11-year-old Hadi Hattab stepped onto his porch to play in the street for the first time since the month-long war between Israel and Hezbollah militants began in Lebanon in July 2006.

Seconds later an explosion of ball bearings shot into his skull from a cluster bomb made in the US and fired, like four million others, by the Israeli armed forces into south Lebanon in the last three days of the conflict, when a ceasefire had already been agreed.

Today, Hadi’s death, and the death of his father Moussa who ran to his son’s aid, and the deaths and maiming of more than 230 Lebanese in what United Nations deminers say was the worst ever use of cluster bombs, are catalysing the ratification of an international treaty outlawing the use and production of such weapons before the end of the year.

Some 100 nations will meet in New Zealand later this month for final discussions before the Cluster Munition Coalition (CMC), launched in November 2003, begins drafting the ban. The treaty will be signed in Oslo, where the process began, and will be the most significant advance in the field of disarmament since the 1997 ban on antipersonnel mines.

For the deminers of south Lebanon, two of whom died last year in the painstaking task of destroying the unexploded cluster bombs, or submunitions, the ban can’t come soon enough.

“This was unprecedented and one of the worst, if not the worst, use of sub-munitions in history,” Dalya Farran, spokeswoman for the UN Mine Action Coordination Centre for South Lebanon (MACSL) told The Sunday Herald.

Of the estimated four million cluster bombs rained onto south Lebanon in the last three days of the July War, MACSL estimates around one million failed to explode on impact, leaving roads, schools, homes and fields littered with lethal explosives that detonate when touched, making them a danger similar to anti-personnel mines.

Hundreds of cluster bombs, or sub munitions, can be contained within a single shell, fired from ground artillery or aircraft, which opens when released, ejecting the bombs across a large area. The small, but lethal bombs caused more civilian casualties in the 2003 invasion of Iraq than any other weapon.

The weapons are currently legal and manufacturers say their failure rates should be between 10-15%. The UN estimates in general cluster bombs fail between 20-30% of the time, but in south Lebanon MACSL estimates between 30-40% of the bombs dropped failed to explode, rising up to 80% in some places.

Israel’s use of Vietnam-war era munitions, such as the M42, M77 and Blue 63, all US or Israeli-made, many of which MACSL said had gone over their expiry date by the time they were dropped on Lebanon, may partly explain the high failure rate.

“By their nature, cluster bombs are very likely to fail,” said Farran. “They are not accurate and not reliable.”

Farran compared the use of cluster bombs in south Lebanon with their use in Kosovo, an area comparable in size, in which NATO war planes dropped cluster bombs as part of a four-month bombing campaign in 1999 to drive out Serbian troops.

“In a two and a half year programme, UNMAS [Mine Action Service] cleared 25,000 sub-munitions and that was 90% of the problem,” she said. “In Lebanon, in a year and a half, we have cleared 137,000 sub-munitions.”

Initial estimates that the majority of unexploded munitions would be cleared by the end of last year have been revised to the end of this year, with deminers turning up an average of ten new infected sites per month, now totalling nearly 1000 individual strike locations.

Despite repeated UN requests, Israel refuses to hand over grid references that would assist in clearing the unexploded bombs, which continue to kill and maim civilians and decimate rural livelihoods.

Israel’s own investigation into the July War, concluded last month, found its military had violated the Geneva Convention on the protection of civilians during conflict, overturning an earlier finding by a military probe that said the weapons had been fired at “open and uninhabited areas [..] in which no civilians were present.”

Major weapons producing states including the US, Russia, Israel and China have opposed the CMC ban, saying they need to keep the option of using cluster bombs for self defence.

Britain, while a signatory to the Oslo process, has been arguing for loopholes in the treaty to allow it to use certain types of cluster munitions, a position criticised by Simon Conway, director of UK-based Landmine Action and co-chair of the CMC steering committee.

“We need the strongest treaty possible in order to create the stigmatization of this weapon, as we did with antipersonnel mines,” Conway told The Sunday Herald. “The UK’s current position is slowing that momentum.”