In Lebanon, a War's Lethal Harvest

Hezbollah launched an average of about 100 rockets a day into Israel during much of the conflict, climbing to 240 near the end, with many of the rockets landing in populated civilian areas. Some U.N. officials speculated that the Israeli military's inability to stop the rocket firing led it to use weapons that sprayed across a wider area. The result was what U.N. officials euphemistically refer to as "contamination" -- a density of unexploded munitions higher than that left in Kosovo in 1999 and in Iraq after the 2003 U.S.-led invasion.

In the 2 1/2 years after the Kosovo conflict, de-miners cleared fewer than 25,000 cluster bomblets, Clark said. In four weeks here, they have cleared more than 30,000 bomblets. Adding to the problem, the landscape remains littered with as many as 400,000 land mines left by Israel and its Lebanese allies during the occupation that ended in 2000.

So far, U.N. officials say, exploding cluster bomblets have killed 14 people and wounded 90 since the war ended.

"In the areas where there were strikes, it's the most extensive contamination I've ever seen," said Clark, who has worked in Kosovo, Sudan, Kuwait, Iraq, Bosnia and Afghanistan. It "is just off the scale."

In the town of Majdel Selm, a short distance from where bulldozers were demolishing the bombed-out remnants of houses, Simon Lovell, a de-miner with the British firm Bactec International, pointed to an American-made bomblet that he had marked off with tape and wooden stakes. Farther off, amid peach, orange and olive trees, lay three others, easy to miss with an untrained eye.

"We treat them almost as a minefield," he said.

Lovell, a former naval diver with a tanned face and adrenaline-fueled exuberance, used to disarm sea mines. He pointed out the bomblets, examples of what he called "a pretty unsmart bomb." The coming rains, he said, would bury them deeper, making them even harder to spot. When they are detonated, they can hurl shrapnel 40 yards.

"The task here is going to be immense," he said.

Shrapnel pockmarked the unfinished two-story house perched over the orchard, its windows still broken. The owner, Marwan Abu Taam, said he and his wife, Shirin Rida, stayed with relatives during the war. When he returned, he walked through the field three or four times without seeing the bomblets, despite the tell-tale signs: a piece of white plastic that keeps the bomblets in tidy rows inside the shell and the white ribbon that helps guide them as they fall. His wife and 2-year-old son, Ali, won't walk outside.

"No one can move anywhere on the land," she said, as her son leaned against her leg.

Southern Lebanon, a furrowed land of valleys and rock-strewn hills, is one of the country's poorest regions. Half the population relies entirely on agriculture. Aid officials say some farmers have taken to burning their unharvested crops in hopes of detonating the bomblets.

Along the barren hills outside Majdel Selm, several goats killed by the bomblets were piled up, the stench of their rotting carcasses carried by the breeze.