Report, Electronic Lebanon, 19 February 2008
"BEIRUT, 18 February (IRIN) - As some 100 nations meet on 18 February to discuss a treaty banning the use of cluster bombs, the New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) has raised its estimate of the bombs and bomblets Israel showered over southern Lebanon in the 2006 war, to as many as 4.6 million.
HRW's estimate -- an increase on the UN figure of about four million -- is based on information gathered from Israeli soldiers who re-supplied Multiple Launch Rocket System units with cluster bombs during the July-August 2006. The number is more than were used in recent conflicts in Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq combined, it said.
Israel fired cluster bombs, either US-supplied or manufactured in Israel, on nearly 1,000 individual strike sites across 1,400 square kilometers of southern Lebanon, an area slightly larger than the US state of Rhode Island.
Each cluster bomb can release up to 2,000 bomblets, and about a quarter of the bomblets failed to explode on impact in Lebanon. Since the war, unexploded bomblets have killed at least 30 people and injured some 200 others.
"The tragedy that has taken place in Lebanon should serve as a catalyst to both national measures and a new international treaty on cluster munitions," said the HRW report entitled "Flooding South Lebanon: Israel's Use of Cluster Munitions in Lebanon in July and August 2006," released on 17 February ahead of the talks......."
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