ZAWTARWEST, 22 January (IRIN) - Deminers clearing Israeli-dropped cluster bombs in south Lebanon are turning up an average of 10 new sites per month, while Israel continues to ignore requests for data that would assist clearing the estimated one million unexploded bomblets, which continue to kill and maim civilians and decimate rural livelihoods. A single cluster bomb can disperse hundreds of bomblets. Read more about Deminers find new cluster bomb sites without Israeli data
JERUSALEM, 28 December (IRIN) - Israel’s military advocate-general, Brig-Gen Avihai Mendelblit, has said the military’s use of cluster munitions during the conflict in Lebanon in 2006 was in accordance with international humanitarian law. Human rights groups and the UN had previously condemned the use of the bombs. In a statement issued on 24 December, the Israeli military said it used cluster munitions to fight Hizballah, the Lebanese Shia militant group, which had “heavily camouflaged” its launching sites for firing rockets at Israel. Read more about Israeli military clears itself of cluster bomb misuse in Lebanon
TYRE, Lebanon, 18 December (IPS) - Kamel Mohammed was pruning lemon trees last winter when his red electric saw detonated an unexploded cluster bomb, blasting shrapnel all over his body. After an operation to remove the metal shards from his chest, Mohammed, a 44-year-old father from the nearby Palestinian refugee camp of Rashidieh in south Lebanon, went straight back to work cultivating fields and chopping wood for coal. Not so lucky was his neighbor and fellow family man, Ahmad Huwaidi, 36, killed instantly when the remaining explosives in an old metal rocket he was cutting to sell ignited from the heat. Read more about Palestinians brave a hazardous profession
A new report from the Arab Association for Human Rights (HRA) focuses on one claim — one that was also raised during the war, particularly by Arab public figures in Israel, but which has not been the subject of detailed attention. This claim is that military installations were positioned by the Israeli army in proximity to Arab civilian locales. The report is based on the testimonies of 80 Arab residents interviewed by the HRA, documenting 20 Arab communities that were hit by an estimated total of some 660 rockets, killing 14 civilians directly. Read more about Report: Israeli military installations near Arab villages harmed civilians
AINAL-HILWEH, 9 December (IRIN) - A desperately needed hospital in Lebanon’s largest and most violent Palestinian refugee camp has been unable to open on time because funds to buy beds and other basic medical equipment have dried up. The US$5m al-Quds hospital in Ain al-Hilweh, just outside the southern port city of Sidon, is the single largest investment in the camp’s 60-year history and aims to treat a range of chronic diseases, heart problems, cancers and nervous disorders suffered by Ain al-Hilweh residents. It also aims to have a children’s wing and an intensive care unit. Read more about Funds dry up for hospital in Ain al-Hilweh camp
BADDAWI, 28 October (IRIN) - Souad al-Sayyed still camps with her children in a classroom strung with washing lines, two months after the battle for Nahr al-Bared Palestinian refugee camp in northern Lebanon ended. Despite the stench from the neighboring toilet and piles of rubbish in the corridors, Souad finds little comfort in the news that her time is up in her temporary home at a public school in Baddawi refugee camp, near the devastated camp. “The school administration said they’re moving us out tomorrow, but nobody told us where we’re going,” she said. Read more about Nahr al-Bared refugees still in limbo
BEIRUT, 17 October 2007 (IRIN) - The Lebanese government’s practices against Palestinian refugees continue to breach the country’s obligations under international human rights law and should be repealed immediately, according to a report released here on 17 October by Amnesty International. Lebanon has the highest percentage of all Palestinian refugees living in abject poverty, according to the UN’s Palestinian relief organization, UNRWA. Read more about Illegal discrimination against Palestinians in Lebanon
TYRE, Lebanon, 15 October (IPS) - The explosion ripped through the tiny garden in rural south Lebanon, hurling Naemah Ghazi to the ground. The shrapnel from the bomb sliced through her legs, and she rapidly lost consciousness. “There was a lot of blood,” her mother Khadija recalls. “All her body was bleeding.” Naemah, 48, lived quietly with her mother in the border town Blida since her father passed away nearly 30 years ago. Read more about What a "safe" cluster bomb did
NAHRAL-BARED, 12 October (IRIN) - The first Palestinian families displaced by 15 weeks of intense fighting between the army and Islamist militants that left much of north Lebanon’s Nahr al-Bared refugee camp in ruins have begun returning home to start rebuilding their lives. “I never imagined I would have to leave my home again,” said 80-year-old Mahmoud Nimr Abdou as he boarded the bus carrying the first refugees home from neighboring Baddawi camp, where the majority of the up to 40,000 people displaced from Nahr al-Bared have been living in cramped conditions. “I will kiss the ground when I return.” Read more about Palestinians return to desolate, dangerous camp
