Long after retreating from Lebanon, Israel keeps killing Lebanese civilians, in particular children, with the 2-4 million (mostly US-supplied) cluster bombs it dumped on southern Lebanon. Read at least the first five paragraphs of yesterday's Reuters article,
Lebanese haunted by deadly cluster bombs:
HALTA, Lebanon (Reuters) - Eleven-year-old Ramy Shibleh was gathering pine cones outside this small southern Lebanese town, hoping to make some money to buy toys ahead of the Muslim Eid al-Fitr holiday.
His father, Ali Shibleh, was waiting at home for Ramy and his brother Khodor, 13. He needed them to help him pick olives.
"Suddenly I heard an explosion," Shibleh said, choking on tears. "I heard Khodor screaming 'Ramy!', I yelled back at him 'Son, where is Ramy?' He said, 'Father, Ramy died.' I told him 'Khodor you are joking', he said, 'No, Ramy is dead."
...
The brothers were heading home when the wheel of their cart jammed against what they thought was a rock.
Ramy bent down, picked up the object and as he raised his arm to throw it out of the way, it exploded, tearing off his right arm and the back of his head. He died instantly. ...
Ramy's death added to a toll still rising after Israel's monthlong war against Hezbollah guerrillas in southern Lebanon. The object he picked up was a cluster bomblet -- one of hundreds of thousands dropped by Israel on the region before an August 14 cease-fire. ...
Between August 14 and October 8, around 20 people were killed in southern Lebanon by cluster munitions. Land mine activists said last month that cluster bombs are still killing or injuring three to four civilians a day, a third of them children.
http://news.scotsman.com/...
In fact the anti-cluster-bombs group Handicap International (http://www.handicap-international.org.uk/... sign their petition to ban cluster bombs!) makes the following estimate of their number in South Lebanon:
Israel dropped an estimated 4 million submunitions on Lebanon during fighting in July and August, and an average of two people are stilled being killed or injured in the country every day, Kathleen Maes, the group's victim assistance coordinator, told reporters.
http://www.iht.com/...
The UN estimates the number of cluster bombs at 2 to 3 million. Jan Egeland, the UN's undersecretary-general for humanitarian affairs, expressed his shock back in August:
"What's shocking and, I would say to me, completely immoral," he said, "is that 90% of the cluster-bomb strikes occurred in the last 72 hours of the conflict, when we knew there would be a resolution, when we really knew there would be an end of this."
That was on Aug. 30, by which time U.N. teams had identified 359 separate cluster-bomb sites.
Since then, the true dimensions of the problem have become even clearer: 770 cluster-bomb sites have now been identified. And the current [as of 10/23/06 - fairleft] U.N. estimate is that Israel dropped between 2 million and 3 million bomblets on Lebanon, of which up to a million have yet to explode.
In fact, it is estimated that there are more unexploded bomblets in southern Lebanon than there are people. They lurk in tobacco fields, olive groves, on rooftops, in farms, mixed in with rubble. They are injuring two or three people every day, according to the United Nations, and have killed 20 people since the cease-fire in August.
"What we did was insane and monstrous," [emphasis added] one Israeli commander admitted to the newspaper Haaretz. "We covered entire towns in cluster bombs."
As Egeland noted, the majority of these bombs were dropped in the last three days of the war--a time when the U.N. resolution to end the fighting had been agreed on, when the war was virtually over, when it was clear that Israel had failed to accomplish its declared objectives in launching this campaign.
http://www.counterpunch.org/...
The original source of the "insane and monstrous" quote is http://www.haaretz.com/...
Additional information and analysis on the cluster bombing of South Lebanon is supplied by James Brooks in an earlier and very well-sourced counterpunch article. He estimates the number of unexploded cluster bombs in the following paragraphs:
If the early clearance data is a rough reflection of the whole, an additional 500,000 BLU 63 bomblets may have been dropped by Israeli warplanes. When we add up UN-MACC's most conservative estimates and modest estimates of BLU 63 and M85 deployment based on early data, the lowest reasonable estimate for the number of cluster submunitions released over southern Lebanon is three million.
In that case, the roughly 500 square mile target region would have "received" one cluster bomblet for every 4400 square feet of land, or thirteen bomblets for every (American) football field. If three million bomblets had been evenly dispersed, every living thing would have been within killing range-eventually.
If the 40 percent dud rate repeatedly found in the first 45,000 recovered bomblets is confirmed across the region, the total number of unexploded cluster submunitions in Lebanon may be 1.2 million or more, a possibility that must concern UN and Lebanese officials.
http://www.counterpunch.org/...
About all of this there is no outrage from America's Israel supporters, notes Rob Eshman in his blog entry, Cluster Silence. Eshman does find such outrage inside Israel, though:
... there is ample evidence to conclude that Israel's use of the cluster bombs in southern Lebanon clearly violated international law. Again it was an Israeli human rights group, the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, that made the argument in a letter to Israeli Attorney General Menahem Mazuz that cluster bombing civilian areas constitutes "an extremely severe violation of the basic principle upon which humanitarian law is based."
The group cited numerous examples where "the firing of cluster bombs in urban areas, with complete disregard for the dangers they pose to the lives of innocent civilians, establishes, prima facie, sufficient criminal intent to carry out the deliberate killing or injury of innocent civilians."
http://www.jewishjournal.com/...
Eshman concludes,
I understand [Israel's] enemies are ruthless and tireless, and that Israel's opponents will undoubtedly harp on the cluster bomb issue with nary a word against Hezbollah, Hamas or Israel's terrorist and dictatorial foes. But it does Israel no favors to stand mute when its policies undermine the country's own moral foundations and challenge basic notions of humanity.
So here's a little hint about when it's time for AIPAC and AJC and the Museum of Tolerance and others to challenge Israel's actions:
When the best defense is "Hezbollah does it, too."
Eshman's Hezbollah reference is to charges by Human Rights Watch that Hezbollah launched cluster bomb rockets into Israel. HRW accuses Hezbollah of launching exactly two cluster-bomb rockets into Israel on July 25. See http://news.bbc.co.uk/... for the latest on those charges and Hezbollah's denial.
To return briefly to the boy ...
The bed that Ramy used to share with his sister is neatly made. A bright blue UNICEF backpack marked with his name lies on top of a wardrobe. "He used to love riding bicycles and playing football," Abdelal said, clutching a frayed yellow jersey her son had worn the day before he died.
"He was only picking the pine nuts to buy the toys he loved."
http://www.stopclustermunitions.org/