TYRE, Lebanon, Oct 15 (IPS) - The explosion ripped through the tiny garden in rural south Lebanon, hurling Naemah Ghazi to the ground. The shrapnel from the bomb sliced through her legs, and she rapidly lost consciousness. "There was a lot of blood," her mother Khadija recalls. "All her body was bleeding."
--
On the morning of Sep. 11, Naemah was out picking vegetables for the evening meal when the bomb -- an Israeli-made M85 cluster munition with a 'self-destruct' mechanism, buried a mere ten metres from her back door -- exploded under her feet.
Naemah was rushed to Sidon's Labib Medical Centre two hours drive away. The doctors amputated her right leg just below the knee, but saved the other within a construct of metal rods.
A month later, Naemah is still in hospital; small and frail on her white metal bed. She is on painkillers and antibiotics, and has become depressed, says hospital supervisor, Shadi Hanouni. The wounds on her left leg are infected, and nurses change her dressings every five hours.
--
Lebanon has a devastating cluster bomb problem. Hit hard during the final days of last summer's conflict with Israel, hundreds of thousands of unexploded munitions are strewn throughout the south's rural towns and fertile fields and valleys. Although there have been 255 civilian and de-mining casualties to date, official requests for Israel's cluster bomb strike data have gone unanswered.
"The reality of the situation is we simply don't know how many there are, and we will never know until the Israelis tell us how many they fired," says Chris Clark, the United Nations programme manager for the Mine Action Coordination Centre (MACC), the official body tasked with coordinating munitions clearance with the Lebanese Army in the south.
---EOE---
http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=39652
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
