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When Israel humiliatingly withdrew from most of south Lebanon after a brutal 18-year occupation it left hundreds of thousands of landmines littered throughout the nation.
Israel claimed to the Western world that its withdraw from Lebanon was a goodwill gesture. Putting aside the absurdity of claiming that your evacuation of someone’s else land is not a goodwill gesture since it’s something that should not be up for debate, Israel refused to handover to the Lebanese government and/or the United Nations the locations of these landmines. Now that would be a goodwill gesture. But Israel has never shown anything but aggression, racism and cruelty against Arabs.
A landmine is cheap to place, but time consuming and expensive to remove. The United Nations since 2000 has been trying to clear all of south Lebanon from landmines.
In 2006, the job got more difficult. In a recognized war crime the state of Israel dropped tens of thousands of cluster bombs on Lebanon. Cluster bombs are banned by many countries since they often lead to great civilian deaths and operate as landmines. Cluster bombs dropped over terrain are hard to spot and often mistaken for toys by children.
Since Israel’s withdraw from most of south Lebanon (it still occupies the Sha’aba Farms) and between the 2006 War (which killed over 1,200 Lebanese mostly civilians), numerous Lebanese have been killed by these Israeli (American provided) weapons of war. Young Lebanese children often accidentally pick up cluster bombs and step on landmines.
Not only has Israel refused to handover the location of landmines but also the coordinates for the cluster bomb droppings. If it did, these Lebanese lives and injures could be spared since the government and UN would quarantine an area until the finished clean up. But without such information, UN workers are racing against the clock hoping to clear up the next bomb before another innocent child is injured or killed. These two Lebanese children were recently injured:
And Israelis like to pretend they’re the democratic and peaceful people in the Middle East while they sit on a list of information that could easily prevent such tragedy. They refuse to hand it over due nothing but malice as children are mined if not dead, and then have the temerity to accuse the Arabs of a lack of goodwill gestures.
And injustices continue:
Nearly four years after Israel littered southern Lebanon with mines during its devastating war with Hezbollah, teenager Mohammed al-Hajj Mussa can barely bring himself to speak of the day he lost his legs. On August 11, 2006, the lean, dark-haired boy was riding behind his father on a motorbike to deliver food to a nearby town badly hit in the Israeli raids when a cluster bomb went off under one of the tyres. "Later, I was told that I was found in a creek about four hours after the explosion," Mohammed, now 15, told AFP at his rundown home in the Palestinian refugee camp of Al-Bass, located in the southern coastal town of Tyre. "I came to when they were pulling me out of the water, and I knew it. I could see my legs falling apart."
As a Palestinian poet once wrote: 'All you have done to our people is registered in notebooks.'
