An unex­ploded clus­ter bomb lies in a field near a pri­vate house in Majd es-Slim, south­ern Lebanon. It’s about the size of a D-cell bat­tery.
© 2006 Chris Allbrit­ton, all rights reserved.
MAJD ES-SLIM, South­ern Lebanon — Ali Herz didn’t think he had any­thing to worry about when he went to check on his neighbor’s house in the south­ern town of Majd es-Slim. After all, the cease-fire between Hezbol­lah and Israel was two days old and it seemed to be hold­ing.
But as he pushed open the heavy black iron gate to enter the gar­den that morn­ing, some­thing hap­pened. A sharp explo­sion threw him back­ward as shrap­nel pep­pered his legs, face and chest. Con­scious but in pain, he started to cry out for help to any­one in the area.
“I thought that my legs might have been cut off and I felt some­thing had been knocked out of my mouth,” he said almost a month later as he sat in his par­ents’ home. He suf­fered a wound to his head and he couldn’t open his eyes, “because of the blood.“
Herz, 26, a mechanic, had stum­bled across what may be the biggest dan­ger fac­ing res­i­dents of south­ern Lebanon now that the war is over: unex­ploded clus­ter bombs. Accord­ing to the United Nations Mine Action Coor­di­na­tion Cen­tre South­ern Lebanon (MACCSL), there are up to 1 mil­lion of the tiny but deadly unex­ploded muni­tions lit­ter­ing the south, many of them Amer­i­can made. Herz was one of the lucky ones. As of Sept. 21, in addi­tion to Herz, 89 peo­ple have been wounded, and 14 killed, accord­ing to cen­ter spokes­woman Dalya Far­ran in Tyre, the head­quar­ters for the cen­ter.
Clus­ter bombs work by launch­ing a con­tainer of sub-munitions or “bomblets” against a tar­get. When the container-which can be deliv­ered either via air­plane, artillery or rocket-bursts open in air, dozens or hun­dreds of smaller sub-munitions are scat­tered over a wide area. A rib­bon attached to the arm­ing pin deploys, both sta­bi­liz­ing the bomblet and arm­ing it. When it strikes the ground, the trig­ger slams into the det­o­na­tor like a fir­ing pin on a pis­tol, caus­ing the bomblet to explode. In some cases, a shaped charge in the bot­tom, like a minia­ture ver­sion of what is found in the IEDs in Iraq, increases the lethal­ity of the bomblet.
Most of the clus­ter bomblets iden­ti­fied so far have been Amer­i­can made, Far­ran said. The muni­tions include Amer­i­can m42s, m77s, m85s and Chinese-made MZD-2s. Some of the m85 muni­tions are Israeli copies of Amer­i­can designs, she added, but she wasn’t sure of the num­bers.
A spokesman for the Israeli Defense Forces said, when asked to com­ment on Israeli use of clus­ter bombs, “All the weapons and muni­tions used by the IDF are legal under inter­na­tional law and their use con­forms with inter­na­tional stan­dards.“
He declined to com­ment fur­ther.
Although there is no inter­na­tional ban on clus­ter weapons in gen­eral, the United States has strict rules about the use of its clus­ter muni­tions against civil­ian tar­gets as laid out by the Arms Export Con­trol Act. Addi­tion­ally, the U.S. and Israel report­edly have secret agree­ments about their use, accord­ing to a report in the New York Times. The State Depart­ment has opened an inves­ti­ga­tion into whether the use of clus­ter bombs by the Israelis vio­lates either the AECA or the secret agree­ments.
“What we’re doing is seek­ing more infor­ma­tion regard­ing alleged improper use of clus­ter muni­tions by the Israelis,” said Nancy Beck, a depart­ment spokes­woman. “Based on the infor­ma­tion that we gather we will take appro­pri­ate mea­sures, if required by the Arms Export Con­trol Act.“
The IDF spokesman also declined to com­ment about the State Depart­ment inves­ti­ga­tion.
While the inves­ti­ga­tion is ongo­ing, a ship­ment of M-26 artillery rockets-cluster weapons-has been held up, accord­ing to the New York Times.
Since 1976, Israel has been the sin­gle biggest recip­i­ent of Amer­i­can for­eign aid, accord­ing to the World Pol­icy Insti­tute in New York. From 2001 – 2005, Israel received $10.5 bil­lion in For­eign Mil­i­tary Financ­ing– con­gres­sion­ally appro­pri­ated grants given to for­eign gov­ern­ments to finance the pur­chase of American-made weapons, ser­vices and training-and $6.3 bil­lion worth of direct U.S. arms sales.
“Being able to pur­chase arms from the United States, at least under U.S. law, is not a right,” said another State Depart­ment offi­cial who requested anonymity in order to dis­cuss the inves­ti­ga­tion. “If we find that that these weapons are not used for the appro­pri­ate pur­poses, the U.S. may decide not to sell or pro­vide weapons in the future.“
In 1982, Con­gress cut off the sale of clus­ter bombs to Israel, fol­low­ing an inquiry that showed they had been improp­erly used against civil­ian tar­gets in Israel’s inva­sion of Lebanon that year. Pres­i­dent Rea­gan lifted the ban six years later.
It was these mines and unex­ploded muni­tions left over from the Israeli inva­sions of 1978 and 1982, as well as those planted by var­i­ous war­ring fac­tions in Lebanon’s 1975 – 1990 civil war, that MACCSL was formed to deal with. “But after the war, we dis­cov­ered we had a huge prob­lem with clus­ter bombs,” said the U.N.‘s Far­ran.
Despite the IDF’s offi­cial state­ment, there are signs that some within the Israeli mil­i­tary estab­lish­ment have had sec­ond thoughts about the use of the weapons. In an arti­cle in Ha’aretz, Israel’s lead­ing left-leaning daily news­pa­per, an unnamed com­man­der in the IDF’s MLRS (Mul­ti­ple Launch Rocket Sys­tem) unit expressed regret at the use of the clus­ter bombs.
“In Lebanon, we cov­ered entire vil­lages with clus­ter bombs,” the com­man­der is quoted as say­ing. “What we did there was crazy and mon­strous.“
In the clos­ing days of the war, he said, his unit launched up to 1,800 clus­ter rock­ets into south­ern Lebanon con­tain­ing up to 1.2 mil­lion bomblets. The U.N. also esti­mates that another 32,000 artillery shells with clus­ter muni­tions were fired, adding more unex­ploded bomblets to the area. An unknown num­ber of clus­ter bombs were dropped from the air. Far­ran saiid more than 1 mil­lion unex­ploded bomblets could still be on the ground.
And that’s one of the main prob­lems. No one is really sure just how many strikes there were — “Each day the new tar­gets are adding up,” said Far­ran.
As of Sept. 26, sur­vey and emer­gency ord­nance dis­posal teams had found 590 con­firmed clus­ter bomb strikes, she said. A sin­gle strike could be one attack on a house or a vil­lage or area.
The offi­cial fail­ure rate of the bomblets is 10 per­cent, said Far­ran, which means that 1 in 10 bomblets will fail to explode on impact but remain armed. How­ever, she said the sur­vey and emer­gency ord­nance dis­posal teams had found that almost 40 per­cent of the recov­ered bomblets had failed. Tak­ing the num­bers from the IDF, that means there are still up to 480,000 unex­ploded bomblets from the IDF’s rock­ets, she said. And that doesn’t include clus­ter bombs dropped from air­planes or fired from artillery.
Those on the ground doing the dan­ger­ous job of clear­ing the bomblets agree.
“I’ve never seen so much like this,” said Mag­nus Bengts­son, the super­vi­sor on an EOD team clear­ing clus­ter bomblets from a neigh­bor­hood in the small town of Hanaouay, 5.5 miles south­east of Tyre and eight miles from the Israeli bor­der. “It’s more than I expected.“
Bengts­son and his team are with the Swedish Res­cue Ser­vices Agency, a group the UN con­tracted for mine clear­ing but which has been pressed into ser­vice to help with the imme­di­ate dan­ger. As he walked through an empty field the size of a soc­cer pitch, Bengts­son pointed to a small, D cell-battery sized object on the ground. It’s an American-made m77, he said, which is designed to take out both peo­ple and armored vehi­cles, includ­ing tanks. The shaped charge can pen­e­trate up to 5 inches of armor, and the cas­ing is scored so it sends out deadly shrap­nel to a radius of about 20 feet.
Bengts­son and other groups tasked by the MACCSL with col­lect­ing and dis­pos­ing of the unex­ploded muni­tions are con­cen­trat­ing on the roads and homes in the affected vil­lages right now. After that, they will start a phase known as bat­tle area clear­ance (BAC) that will attempt to clear all the bomblets from the agri­cul­tural fields through­out the entire south. It’s a job the UN hopes will be com­pleted by the end of 2007.
There is no blan­ket ban on clus­ter muni­tions, but the Geneva Con­ven­tions for­bid their use against civil­ian tar­gets. When asked if he had seen any evi­dence that Hezbol­lah had been fir­ing Katyusha rock­ets from Hanaouay and draw­ing Israeli fire, Bengts­son, who served in the Swedish army in Bosnia, Kosovo and Iraq as a demo­li­tions expert, shook his head no.
Res­i­dents of the south are grate­ful to the UN and its EOD teams, but they worry that a delay in get­ting to all the bomblets will lead to the loss of tobacco and olive har­vests, the main­stay crops of the south.
“We hope they can clear the fields because we rely on them,” said Ali’s mother, Mariam Herz. “We lost the sea­son for the tobacco … and we had a few cows that were killed.“
Today, Ali Herz walks slowly with a limp, and when he shows his legs and chest, the shrap­nel wounds are so numer­ous he looks like he suf­fers from chicken pox. He still has two pieces of shrap­nel in his left thigh, he said, and he has to put cush­ions between his knees in order to sleep. He can­not work because he has to get under cars, some­thing his injuries pre­vent him from doing.
Still, he wor­ries about oth­ers and the remain­ing bombs. “After I hear an explo­sion,” he said, “I want to go and see if anyone’s been hurt because I don’t want any­one to go through what I’ve been through.”

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