UN slams Israel as unexploded cluster bombs discovered

The UN humanitarian chief has accused Israel of “shocking” and “completely immoral” behaviour for dropping large numbers of cluster bombs on Lebanon when a ceasefire in its war with Hezbollah was in sight.

Jan Egeland told a news briefing yesterday that Israel had either made a “terribly wrong decision” or had “started thinking afterwards”. The remarks were unusually harsh, even for Egeland, who often ignores an unwritten rule that UN officials should not criticise member states too severely.

“What’s shocking and I would say, to me, completely immoral, 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,” Egeland told a news conference.

Anat Friedman, the spokeswoman for Israel’s mission to the UN, said she had no immediate comment on Egeland’s remarks. In Israel, the government also had no immediate comment and the Israeli army referred to its earlier statement that all the weapons it uses “are legal under international law and their use conforms with international standards”.

Cluster bomblets, which have the explosive force to destroy armoured vehicles, are packed into bombs dropped from aircraft or into artillery shells. Between 200 and 600 of the bomblets are typically scattered over an area the size of a football pitch from a single cluster-bomb canister.

An unusual number of cluster bombs used in the war did not detonate on impact, possibly because they were old, Egeland said. Usually 10-15% of the bomblets fail to explode immediately.

According to some estimates, up to 70% of the Israeli bomblets failed to explode initially.

Civilians returning to their homes in southern Lebanon are experiencing “massive problems” as a result of these unexploded munitions, Egeland said.

“We’re finding strikes that are in people’s houses, in the middle of the street, around hospitals,” said Chris Clark, program manager of the UN Mine Action Co-ordination Center in southern Lebanon.

Approximately 250,000 Lebanese, of the one million displaced, cannot move back into their homes, many because of unexploded munitions.

“Every day people are maimed, wounded and are killed by these ordnance,” Egeland said.

UN and human rights organisations said yesterday that 13 people, including three children, had been killed between the August 14 ceasefire and Tuesday, and 46 people have been wounded.

“Every day we have to revise our count of what the scope of the problem is,” said Clark. “We just don’t know how big the problem is, only that it is huge at the moment and getting bigger every day.”

Human Rights Watch researchers have said that the density of cluster bombs in southern Lebanon was higher than any place they had seen.

“Countries can’t keep on ignoring this,” said Thomas Nash of the Cluster Munitions Coalition, an umbrella campaign that includes Human Rights Watch, at a meeting yesterday on the issue in Geneva. “While children and civilians are being killed every day in Lebanon because of cluster munitions that have just been used, governments are sitting here in Geneva.”

Egeland urged countries that sold cluster bombs to the Israelis, including the US, to have “serious talks with Israel”.

The UN Mine Action Co-ordination Center, which has so far assessed 85% of the bombed areas in Lebanon, has identified 379 bomb strike areas that are contaminated with as many as 100,000 unexploded bomblets.

Egeland said about 750,000 displaced people had managed to return to southern Lebanon, which he called “remarkable”, but about a third of those could not yet enter their homes.

Egeland will travel to Stockholm today to launch a revised humanitarian appeal for Lebanon.