UN bemoans slow Lebanon cluster bomb clearance

"If the Israelis give us the exact locations of the targeted sites, it will accelerate our work," Dalya Farran, the spokeswoman of the United Nations' Mine Action Coordination Center (MACC), told AFP.

"For the time being, it is the people and the (Lebanese) army who are giving out the alerts on the sites, which are subsequently cleared," she said.

Israel dropped more than 1.2 million bomblets on Lebanon during its July-August war with the Shiite militants of Hezbollah, according to Israeli daily Haaretz.

The UN has found that Israel dropped 90 percent of all the cluster bombs it used in Lebanon in the three days immediately preceding the August 14 ceasefire.

Since the end of fighting, 22 people have been killed and 135 wounded by unexploded bomblets, according to an AFP count.

Farran said that demining teams had located some 800 cluster bomb sites in south Lebanon so far but that none of them had yet been completely cleared of unexploded ordenance.

Forty-seven demining teams have been at work since October 31 in an operation financed by the United Arab Emirates and the United Nations.

UN chief Kofi Annan has condemned Israel's use of cluster bombs and has also criticized its failure to provide UN peacekeepers with detailed maps of where they were dropped.

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