Marc Garlasco, Senior Military Analyst

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I’m Mark Garlasco, the senior military analyst at Human Rights Watch. During the summer of 2006, I spent a few weeks in Lebanon during the war between Israel and Hezbollah. Once the bombing had stopped and the ceasefire was over, Human Rights Watch researchers went to check on the damage, investigate what had happened to the civilians there.

It was really immediately apparent to us that this was something beyond the scale of any kind of destruction I’ve ever seen in my career. I’ve been to Kosovo, and to Iraq, Gaza, but this was like being on the moon. Towns, villages, homes, everything was rubble-ized. What was most striking was the widespread use of cluster bombs by the Israeli military.

Cluster bombs are very small bombs about the size of a Pepsi can, or a baseball, and hundreds of them are housed inside of a larger bomb. And when the larger bomb opens up, these small bombs will spread over the size of a football field, raining destruction over to that area.

On July 24th, 2006, Human Rights Watch was the first organization to break the news of cluster bomb use by the Israeli military in Southern Lebanon, in the town of Blida. In this town, there was a death and there were numerous injuries, including women and children. Immediately after this report went out from Human Rights Watch, the U.S. State Department halted shipments of cluster bombs to Israel.

In February 2007, the State Department will be releasing a report on an investigation as to whether Israel violated an agreement with the United States, on whether or not it would use American-manufactured weapons against civilians. Most of the cluster bombs used by Israel in Southern Lebanon were American-made.

Cluster bomb use is indiscriminate: the weapon doesn’t know if a child, a civilian or a soldier is picking it up. Once you move an unexploded cluster bomb, it explodes. We’ve seen this happen in Iraq, Afghanistan and Kosovo. And this should have been obvious to the Israeli military, and yet they used these weapons.

To date, there are about one million unexploded bombs laying around the ground. We found them everywhere. Cluster bombs were on the streets, in homes, on roofs, in the hospital. If you take the use of cluster bombs by the United States and the United Kingdom in the wars in Kosovo, in Iraq and in Afghanistan, and put them together, you will not come close to what Israel did in 2006. During three weeks in the war in Iraq in 2003, the United States dropped approximately two million cluster sub-munitions – the small bomblets inside of a cluster bomb.

In only three days during the war in 2006, Israel dropped four million in Lebanon. The problem with these weapons is two-fold. One, they cover wide areas, not just where the target is and the destruction is as large as a football field.

Secondly, and most important in Lebanon, is that many of the weapons don’t explode. In Lebanon, we were finding upwardsof 40%. When we went from town to town, we continued to find people: children, women, potentially endangered by them.

The cluster bombs were used in Southern Lebanon in the summer of 2006 but there’s a lot that can be done today.

First, Human Rights Watch is pressuring the United States not to transfer any new cluster bombs to Israel. Secondly, Human Rights Watch is calling on Israel to provide detailed strike-data to the United Nations.

This would help the UN find the bombs on the ground, clean them up and save lives. Israel continues to refuse to provide this to the UN.