Organization’s humanitarian coordinator in Lebanon says ‘most bomblets were fired by the time the conflict had been largely resolved in the form of Resolution 1701’; adds: it seems to me extraordinary that they were fired off in the last hours of the war into areas where civilian populations were known to be going
Reuters
"A UN official said on Tuesday that Israel dropped at least 350,000 cluster bomblets on south Lebanon in its war with Hizbullah guerrillas, mostly when the conflict was all but over, leaving a deadly legacy for civilians,. “The outrageous fact is that nearly all of these munitions were fired in the last three to four days of the war,” David Shearer, the United Nations humanitarian coordinator in Lebanon, told a news conference in Beirut.
“Outrageous because by that stage the conflict had been largely resolved in the form of (UN Security Council) Resolution 1701,” he said.
Shearer said Israel had not explained why it fired so many cluster bombs across the south as the war drew to a close. Nor had it responded to a UN Request for the map coordinates of the cluster bomb strikes to hasten clearance efforts.
UN Emergency Relief Coordinator Jan Egeland has called Israel “Completely immoral” for using them in residential areas.
The United Nations has so far identified 516 cluster bomb strike locations and says 30 to 40 percent of the bomblets they scattered over the south failed to explode at the time."
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