"It is an outrage that we have 100,000 unexploded bombs" in southern Lebanon that will take a year or two to clear, said Jan Egeland, the U.N. Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs.
"Every day people are killed and maimed," he added. "Civilians will die disproportionately" and more children than Hezbollah fighters will be killed, he charged.
Responding to previous accusations, the Israel Defense Forces said "all the weapons and ammunitions used by the IDF are legal under international law and their use conforms with international standards."
Saying that 90 percent of the cluster bombs that the Israel Defense Forces dropped on southern Lebanon fell in the last three days of the war, Egeland said, "We have to find out why," when Israel knew the conflict was coming to an end.
Last week, the U.S. State Department announced it had begun an inquiry into the alleged Israeli use of American-made cluster bombs in southern Lebanon.
The inquiry will seek to determine whether Israel violated agreements with the United States that restrict when the weapons can be used.
The Reagan administration imposed a six-year ban on the sale of cluster ammunitions to Israel after a congressional investigation found Israel had misused such weapons during its 1982 invasion of Lebanon.
2006-08-31
04:49:30
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