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In Lebanon, a War's Lethal Harvest
"You know how you sprinkle seeds on the ground?" asked Hussein Ali, a 47-year-old municipal worker who had brought Lovell to a hilltop where dozens of bomblets lay unexploded. "That's what the bombs are like down here."
Ali and some of his neighbors acknowledged that there were Hezbollah fighters in the town. But as they looked at the bare hillsides, the men wondered aloud about the military logic of targeting such fields with cluster munitions.
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"Maybe if there were trees or something," Ali said.
In Saqlawi's village of Deir Qanoun, Lovell found four holes where residents had picked up 1,013 bomblets on their own. Residents said landowners were paying the more daring among them $1 to $2 for each bomblet they disposed of. The bomblets were piled in crates and boxes. Along the road, a tractor driver asked a passerby, "Will I die if I go in there?"
Down the street, Saqlawi hopped among the piles of rubble where he used to live with his wife and 6-month-old son, Hussein.
"Everything's gone," he said, "the house, the trees, the olive harvest. Everything's gone."
He gave a bitter grin. "Praise God," he said.
Correspondent Scott Wilson in Jerusalem contributed to this report.

