LEBANON / CLUSTER BOMBS (Part 1)

In July 2006, war reared its ugly head once more in Lebanon when Hezbollah fighters stole across the border and kidnapped two Israeli soldiers.

Israel's response was immediate and furious. Huge amounts of ordnance were dropped on southern Lebanon leaving village after village in ruins.

Hezbollah responded by firing hundreds of rockets into civilian areas of northern Israel.

But the cruelest legacy of the conflict was the widespread use of cluster bombs by Israel - an estimated one million of which now sit unexploded on the ground, lying in wait for the unsuspecting.

Ninety percent of them were dropped in the last 72 hours of the conflict when the ceasefire was imminent.

SOUNDBITE (English) Federic Gras, Team Leader, Mines Advisory Group (MAG):

"So you have one sub-munition here with a local marking - it's a pile of stones to warn people. You have one impact here - you can see the crater. You have another sub munition here, and another one over there. So it's quite heavily contaminated here."

Since the end of the war more than a hundred civilians have been killed or injured by cluster bombs.

Wafaa Hattab owns a hair salon in Nabatiye, and the shrapnel pockmarks on the mirror are a stark reminder of the day cluster bombs tore her family apart.

One day in August, her eleven year old son Hadi stepped on a cluster bomb outside the shop.

And when his uncle rushed out to help, he too stepped on a bomb. Both were killed.

SOUNDBITE (English) Wafaa Hattab, mother of child victim of clusterbomb:

"I remember his cute chubby legs ? I can't say anymore"

SOUNDBITE (English) Dahlya Farhan, Media Officer, United Nations Mine Action Coordination Centre:

"All of south Lebanon is contaminated. There is no such area that is only contaminated by the border or by the Tyre area, or south of the Litani only because they are also north of the Litani. Basically it's everywhere you go. Everywhere you go you will have the problem of unexploded ordnance, specifically cluster bombs."

Clearance teams are working as fast as they can throughout the south, and each afternoon the hillside farms echo with the frequent thud of detonation as deminers destroy their deadly cache.

But even by the best estimates it will take until the end of 2007 to clear all the cluster bombs from the fields of southern Lebanon.

And until people can go back into their farms without fear then normal life will remain a distant dream.

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