Ninety per cent of the land contaminated by cluster bombs in South Lebanon should be cleared by the end of 2008, the United Nations Mine Action Coordination Centre (UNMACC) said. UNMACC spokeswoman Dalya Farran said that a major factor that caused the delay in clearing all the 38 million square metres of infested land is that Israel has been refusing to provide maps of where it has dropped cluster bombs. She added that new stretches of land fouled by cluster bombs were being located on a daily basis, since Israel dropped cluster bombs in the same areas in multiple instances during the war. The UN and human rights groups say Israel dropped about 4 million cluster bomblets during last summer’s war, most of them in the final 72 hours – after the terms of a UN-brokered ceasefire had been agreed. A British demining expert was killed last week by a cluster bomb left over from the war. He died instantly when the bomb went off as he was sweeping for ordnance in Bint Jbeil.
ISRAEL IMPEDING EFFORT TO CLEAR CLUSTER BOMBS
Ninety per cent of the land contaminated by cluster bombs in South Lebanon should be cleared by the end of 2008, the United Nations Mine Action Coordination Centre (UNMACC) said. UNMACC
