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U.N. Laments Slow Cluster Bomb Clearance

A U.N. spokeswoman has lamented the slow progress of a United Nations-led operation to clear Israeli sub-munitions from Lebanon and again called on the Jewish state to hand over detailed maps of where they had been dropped.
"If the Israelis give us the exact locations of the targeted sites, it will accelerate our work," Dalya Farran, the spokeswoman of the United Nations' Mine Action Coordination Center (MACC), told Agence France Presse.

"For the time being, it is the people and the (Lebanese) army who are giving out the alerts on the sites, which are subsequently cleared," she said.

Israel dropped more than 1.2 million bomblets on Lebanon during its July-August war with Hizbullah, according to Israeli daily Haaretz.

But the U.N. and human rights groups accuse the Jewish State of having spread as many as 4 million cluster bombs across the south. U.N. de-mining experts say up to 1 million of the cluster bombs failed to explode and continue to threaten civilians.

The U.N. has also found that Israel dropped 90 percent of all the cluster bombs it used in Lebanon in the three days immediately preceding the August 14 U.N.-brokered ceasefire.

Since the end of fighting, 22 people have been killed and 135 wounded by unexploded bomblets, according to an AFP count.

Farran said that demining teams had located some 800 cluster bomb sites in south Lebanon so far but that none of them had yet been completely cleared of unexploded ordnance.

Forty-seven demining teams have been at work since October 31 in an operation financed by the United Arab Emirates and the U.N.

On Friday, Hizbullah said one of its fighters was killed while he was dismantling a cluster bomb in the southern village of Arnoun, near Nabatiyeh.

U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan has condemned Israel's use of cluster bombs and has also criticized its failure to provide U.N. peacekeepers with detailed maps of where they were dropped.(AFP-AP-Naharnet)

Beirut, 11 Nov 06, 09:29


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