Cluster bombs lie in wait for Lebanese children

BINT JBEIL, Lebanon, Aug 25: Like a small black football, it lies in the dirt not far from Haitham Daaboul's front door in the southern Lebanese town of Bint Jbeil.

It looks innocuous, but a careless kick from a passing child would detonate this cluster bomb, one of thousands of unexploded devices Israel scattered over the towns, villages and hillsides of south Lebanon during its 34-day war with Hizbollah fighters.

The bomblets can maim or kill. In war time, they might hit guerrillas firing rockets. Now with a shaky truce in force, they lie where they fell, creating random minefields over wide areas.

''We can't let the children go outside. There are many cluster bombs in the streets,'' said Daaboul's wife Nadia.

''We've told them to be frightened of things shaped like a ball, a plate, anything, even stones in the street,'' she said.

''It's a real pain. The children are asking 'how can we live like this? When can we go out? When can we have a normal life?''' The Daabouls and their four children are living with a score of relatives in a house they rented after returning to the shattered town after an Aug. 14 truce halted fighting.

Bint Jbeil saw some of the fiercest battles of the war, forcing almost all the townsfolk to flee. The Daaboul family odyssey took them from one makeshift shelter to another around the southern city of Tyre and eventually to Beirut.

''Their life has changed,'' Nadia, a slim 28-year-old woman in a headscarf, said of her children. ''They used to wander all over Bint Jbeil -- to the market, the playground, their grandfather's house.

Now they are caged in.

SHELL ON BALCONY

Down the street, an unexploded shell lies on the balcony of a building overlooking a bombed stadium -- it's hard to imagine how Bint Jbeil's 4,000 people can pick up their lives while so many deadly leftovers from the war carpet the landscape.

Children are at particular risk from cluster bombs, such as the one that was lying in wait for 10-year-old Hassan Tahini and his cousin in the border village of Aita al-Shaab.

''We were walking without paying attention, we saw something, but we didn't know it was a bomb,'' said Tahini from his hospital bed in Tyre. ''We saw a little bit of it sticking out of the earth. We said to ourselves, 'it's a toy, so what?' ''We trod on it. It exploded and we flew two or three metres through the air,'' he said. ''God saved me.'' Tahini spent two days in intensive care at Tyre's Jebel Amel hospital, along with his 12-year-old cousin Sikni, with multiple wounds to his small intestine, liver and stomach.

REUTERS