The guns may be more silent, but hundreds of
thousands of cluster bomblets sprayed over south Lebanon in at least 770 Israeli strikes still pose a deadly danger to humans and animals. Since the ceasefire on August 14, 156 persons (as of October   27, 2006) have become victims of cluster munitions,  90% of which were civilians, one third of which are   under the age of 18 years.

Recent incidents:

November 17, 2006 – A Lebanese citizen was wounded in an explosion of a cluster bomb in the village of Yanouh.This evening, a cluster bomb exploded in the village of Yanouh, which led to the amputation of the fingers of Adel Haider (28 years).

November 10, 2006 – A Lebanese farmer has been killed and another one injured by an Israeli cluster bomb left over from this summer’s war. Mohammed Rizk, 36, and the other man, who was unnamed, were killed Friday as they gathered olives in a grove in the southern village of Kfar Roumman, near Nabatiya.  

Tayseer Rizk was killed in a cluster bomb blast on Friday while clearing unexploded ordnance dropped by Israel during the recent war in Lebanon. Tayseer was a memeber of a group that Hizbullah had formed to clear hundreds of thousands of cluster bombs strewn by Israel in large areas of south Lebanon.

November 9, 2006 – Hadi Ismail, 9,  entered his class on Thursday with a cluster bomb in his hand, eager to show off his new discovery to his classmates. When his teacher realized what was going on, she asked Ismail to put the bomb carefully on his desk and then evacuated everyone from the room. According to Ali Shuaib, a contact officer with the Mines Advisory Group (MAG), an emergency team from MAG succeedded in defusing the bomb, which could have caused heavy damage.

October 31, 2006 – A man was killed and two other people injured in eastern Lebanon when part of an Israeli cluster bomb exploded in the man’s hands.  Truck driver Hafez Khalil Abbas, 35, had spotted a bomblet outside a school in the Rass el-Ain quarter of Baalbeck. It exploded after he picked it up, killing him instantly and hurting the two others.

October 22, 2006 – A 12-year-old boy who was picking olives became the 22nd victim.

October 17, 2006 – When Mohammed Jawwad saw the green metal ball lying in the field near his village, he didn’t see danger, he saw profit. The 18-year-old, who was scavenging for scrap metal he could sell, had been told about the cluster bombs that Israel had fired into south Lebanon during the war this summer, but he didn’t know what they looked like. He poked at the ball with a stick, and seconds later he was dead. “We couldn’t tell what it was — but when the stick hit it, it exploded,” said Ali Jawwad, Mr. Jawwad’s 15-year-old cousin. He was standing behind Mr. Jawwad when the bomb exploded, and has been hospitalized since the blast after shrapnel punctured his lower torso and upper thighs. Mr. Jawwad, who died last Tuesday, was the 21st person killed since the war by cluster bomblets left behind in south Lebanon.

[Updates were not maintained before 17 October: if you have information to contribute on cluster bomb incidents before 17 October, please send them to us, with the source, at tadamon@resist.ca with “cluster bomb incidents” in the subject line.]

Other earlier incidents (Before October 17):

Mahmoud Yacoub (in the picture above) 36-year-old farmer had taken his herd of goats out at about 4 o’clock in the afternoon when he stepped on something that exploded. Bleeding and in pain, he made his way to a small shrub, where he sat and waited for rescue. At first he thought it would come immediately, but no one showed up. So for two hours, Yacoub said he felt he was going to die. Villagers heard the explosion and went to the site, only to find dead goats. Yacoub was missing, but his neighbors were too scared to venture off in search of him, fearful of more deadly cluster bomb blasts. Eventually it was Yacoub’s sister who located him, drawn to him by his whispers. He survived what many who encounter cluster bombs don’t, but two months later an infected foot is still not healed.

Six-year-old ‘Abbas Yusef Shibli described to Amnesty International delegates how a cluster bomb exploded as he tried to pick it up in the village of Blida on 26 August. Speaking from a hospital bed, Abbas said he was playing with three friends when he tried to pick up what looked like a “perfume bottle”. Abbas suffered a ruptured colon, ruptured gall bladder, perforated lung and torn medial nerve and has so far undergone two blood transfusions. His three playmates were also injured, but discharged after two days.

In the next room, Mahmud Yaqub, a 38-year-old shepherd, lay with his leg in plaster having had it shattered when he stepped on a cluster bomb. Mahmud said he’d lost four of his 21 goats during the Israeli attacks as they were unable to get to water. He was rarely able to take them outside during the fighting and now, since the ceasefire, cluster bombs litter the hillsides which are their normal pasture.

At another hospital, Amnesty International visited 13-year-old Hassan Hussein Hamadi who remains in a coma after surgery. His family said that, on 27 August, he and his five brothers and sisters had been playing in the front yard of their home in the village of Deir al-Qanun south of Tyre when he picked up a canister type cluster bomb that then exploded. The explosion blew off four fingers of his right hand, leaving only his little finger and he sustained major injuries to his shoulder and abdomen.

19-year-old Hussein Qaduh, a student in accounting at the Beirut Islamic Technical Institute, was severely injured by a cluster bomb on 28 August in the southern Lebanese village of Soultaniye as he walked along a path in the village next to a football field. When Amnesty International delegates visited the area the next day, they found it was littered with unexploded cluster munitions, some of them a few inches from the path, where the blood was still visible on the ground. Hussein underwent extensive surgery for haemorrhaging in the intestines and liver. This was stopped but bleeding continued in the brain. His prognosis was described as extremely critical.

National Day Against Cluster Munitions