Israel's Lebanon war showcased cluster bomb horrors

Israel inadvertently galvanised an international campaign to ban cluster munitions by hastily raining bomblets over south Lebanon before a U.N.-agreed halt to its 2006 war with Hezbollah fighters could take effect.

"It was the massive use of cluster munitions in the last 72 hours of that conflict that outraged the world," Mary Wareham of the New York-based Human Rights Watch group told Reuters.

Norway initiated negotiations on a treaty outlawing cluster munitions which about 100 nations - but not Israel, the United States, Russia or China - are due to sign in Oslo next week.

The Beirut government pushed hard for the treaty and Foreign Minister Fawzi Salloukh says he will be in Norway to sign it.

Cluster bombs are still killing and maiming people in south Lebanon, a hilly region of towns and farming villages where nearly all the land is used for crops or grazing.

Rasha Zayoun was at home sorting through a bag of thyme gathered by her father last year when her hand snagged on the ribbon of a cluster bomblet. The blast blew off her left leg.

"There was a power cut, I didn't see it was a cluster bomb," said the shy 18-year-old in a headscarf, sitting at a sewing machine in a school for disabled people in Sarafand, near Tyre.

With a prosthetic limb under her jeans, she has learned to walk again and hopes one day to open a tailor's shop.

Zayoun is among more than 270 people wounded by cluster munitions in Lebanon since the war. About 40 have been killed.

Lamis Zein, site supervisor for an all-woman battle area clearance team in the south, recalled how villagers returned after the conflict to find their homes infested with bomblets.

"They were in backyards, on rooftops, in the fields," said the feisty mother of two, who trained in January to join clearance efforts run by Norwegian People's Aid (NPA).

Reuters