"We will be clearing unexploded cluster munitions from the rubble of the villages of southern Lebanon for another decade," said Simon Conway, director of Land mine Action. "That is the grim reality," he told reporters in Geneva.

Before the recent war between Israel and Hezbollah guerrillas in the south, de-mining teams were still clearing unexploded cluster munitions from Israel's 1978 and 1982 incursions into Lebanon, according to the advocacy group which is campaigning for an international ban on their use.

Such weapons continue to kill and maim civilians, especially children, for years after a conflict, it said.

The United Nations estimates that 100,000 cluster bomblets that failed to explode lie in Lebanon, with most landing during the final 72 hours of the war, which ended in an August 14 ceasefire.

U.N. Emergency Relief Coordinator Jan Egeland has called Israel "completely immoral" for using them in residential areas.

GREATER THAN KOSOVO, CAMBODIA
"My understanding from the people I have spoken to in southern Lebanon is that the scale of cluster munition contamination is much greater than was seen in Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq," said Conway, a former de-miner in post-conflict zones including Kosovo, Afghanistan and Cambodia.

Israel denies using the weapons illegally and accuses Hezbollah of firing rockets into Israel from civilian areas.

Three types of artillery-delivered cluster bombs were used by Israel in Lebanon -- two U.S.-made (M42 and M77) and one Israeli (M85), each with roughly the same failure rate of 40 percent, he said.

So far, the United Nations has found 400 strike sites where cluster bombs -- "a lot of them U.S.-manufactured" -- were used, said David Shearer, U.N. humanitarian coordinator in Lebanon.

U.N. de-mining teams, who have destroyed 2,900 sub-munitions so far, predict it would take 12 to 15 months to clean up the cluster bombs.

"Currently one person per day is being killed and three people per day are being injured by ordnance of all types," Shearer told reporters.

Some 100 de-miners -- from Sweden, Britain and New Zealand -- will be deployed by the end of the week, according to the U.N. official, who expected the U.N. force in south Lebanon (UNIFIL) to be more involved as troop levels rise.

Majority killed in Lebanon were civilians
A local observer who has been following up on the cluster bomb issue told Ya Libnan" Israel proved beyond any doubt that it is a terrorist state. These bombs were not directed at Hezbollah fighters but at the Lebanese civilians and only terrorists kill civilians." . More than 90 % of those killed and wounded in Lebanon during the war were civilians ...and mainly children, while 80 % of those killed in Israel were military personnel.

Picture: Lebanese Darwish Abd el-Aal looks at an unexploded cluster bomb hanging on a tree in an orchard as he shows it to the media, in the southern village of Mansouri, Lebanon ( AP)

Sources: Reuters, Ya Libnan, AP