A French UN peacekeeper holds an inert Israeli cluster bomblet in a southern Lebanese village. Photo by: AFP

Clearance teams, dressed in protective clothing and headgear, pass their metal detectors over every centimetre (inch) of the contaminated sites and mark the area where there is a metallic presence. Other experts then come to dig up any bombs and transport them to another site where they are exploded. As Mohamed Balhas recovers at his home from the two operations he has endured to remove the shrapnel from his chest, he contemplates going back to work. But the thought is daunting.
"Of course we are afraid to work and do our jobs, but we have to. We have to put food on the table," he said. As the demining teams cease their operations, "the potential for accidents will definitely increase" according to Farran who said that 2005 saw a "dramatic increase" in the casualty rate when a previous demining operation was stopped. "43 percent of the areas affected by the cluster bombs dropped during the July 2006 war have been cleared”, she said, “and the direct threat has been eliminated from 49 percent of the contaminated areas -- which means the surface bombs have been removed. But eight percent still needs to be worked on."

But it's not only the lethal bomblets that are causing sleepless nights for residents of southern Lebanon."Aside from the cluster bombs, we still have 300,000 landmines along the Blue Line (the frontier with Israel)," said Tyre mayor Abdel Hosn al-Husseini, referring to mines laid by Israel before its withdrawal from southern Lebanon in 2000. "Maybe Georgia is distracting donors' attention," he added. Husseini said that 45,000 cluster bombs were cleared from one village alone. "Many of the bombs were dropped on agricultural lands, which means farmers are staying away from their land," he said. He estimated that 80 percent of the people in southern Lebanon worked in the agricultural sector, particularly tobacco, olives and bananas. When an area is cleared, the surface bombs are removed as well as those detected below the surface. But there is always risk that some go undetected. Yehya Balhas, a 43-year-old farmer, said "we will continue to feel the effects of cluster bombs for another 100 or 200 years. This area was supposed to be clean, but our neighbour was hurt just the other day when one blew up. There are some areas where you can't even work the land."