By Anne Chaon
Agence France Presse
18 August 2006
TEBNIN, Lebanon, Aug 18 2006--Kneeling in the rubble, the
deminer gently handled a tiny metallic tube, trying to
defuse one of the thousands of bomblets littering southern
Lebanon.
These deadly leftovers of weeks of fighting between Israel
and Hezbollah guerrillas continue to kill and maim nearly
a week after both sides silenced their guns, creating what
one munitions expert called a "humanitarian catastrophe"
as thousands displaced by the war return home.
"This has the potential to be a huge humanitarian issue,"
said Marc Garlasco, senior military analyst at Human
Rights Watch.
"People are coming back to their homes, they're hugging
and kissing and glad just to have survived and then there
are bombs going off," he said.
Just hours after the announcement of a cessation of
fighting on Monday, one civilian was killed and six others
wounded when Israeli cluster bombs exploded in the
southern village of Ansar.
In the southern Lebanon hillside town of Tebnin, Israeli
warplanes dropped hundreds of bombs right up to the last
day of the month-long conflict, which ended Monday.
In front of a hospital, a half-meter-deep crater has been
gouged into the pavement where one cluster bomb slammed
into the road, spraying the area with hundreds of tiny,
shrapnel-filled devices designed to shred anything they
strike.
"On Wednesday we removed 54 cluster bombs from the main
road in front of the hospital, and yesterday another 44,"
said Marck Masche, an expert with the British demining
organisation Mine Action Group (MAG).
"The main problem is cluster bombs -- there are hundreds
and hundreds of them," he told AFP.
As much as a quarter of the ordnance fired during the
fighting failed to explode, creating vast minefields in
villages and fields where hundreds of thousands of people
who fled the war are trying to return.
Masche's team has found countless bomblets in a home in
Tebnin that would have been undetectable to untrained
eyes, he said.
"We don't want people to try this for themselves," he
said, bending over one of the bomblets, protected only by
an armoured vest.
"If this exploded, I would die," he said, explaining why
he wore neither helmet nor protective bomb apron.
With no bomb disposal units arriving that morning, the
team -- four Lebanese munitions experts and a medic --
have to detonate the explosive on the site.
Surrounded by sandbags, the bomblet erupts in a sharp
blast that echoes off the hills. But countless others
remain.
"Some of the villages are completely contaminated from one
end to the other ... people are moving in and living among
UXOs (unexploded ordnance)," said Steven Priestley,
director for international projects with MAG.
MAG is currently trying to raise money for a three-month
emergency phase that gives priority to clearing homes of
the explosives, he said.
Many of the bombs are hard to see because they are very
small and likely covered in dust and debris, he said.
Disposing of them is no problem, "but finding them all is
a real nightmare".
Back in Tebnin, 27 year-old Lebanese ordnance expert Fatel
Fahes recounted how his team had cleared one home of
explosives, saying the family had "just returned with the
children but could not even go in the door".
He warned that the area's tobacco fields are also infested
with unexploded bombs -- again affecting the lives of
those caught in the area.
"If they cannot reach their fields, they lose everything
they have," he said.
Masche refused to guess how long it might take to clear
the area of unexploded bombs. On top of those left by the
most recent fighting, an estimated half-million landmines
still lie along the Lebanon-Israel border, put down during
previous conflicts, according to MAG's Priestley.
"The entire area deserves a year of solid cleaning, but
for the moment we only remove (the bombs) that we can
see," he said.
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