Belgian UN peacekeeping soldiers search for cluster bombs in a field in southern Lebanon. Photo by: AFP

Mohamed Balhas was on his tractor clearing a patch of land near his home in southern Lebanon last week when a cluster bomb exploded, shooting shrapnel into his chest and left leg. "I didn't know what hit me. Suddenly blood was pouring from my chest," said the 36-year-old Balhas.

With funds drying up for the massive demining operations under way in southern Lebanon since the end of the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah, the UN fears that such incidents, already all-too-frequent, will increase. The demining teams have been working all-out to clear the more than one million cluster bombs Israel dropped throughout south Lebanon during the last days of its devastating 34-day war with Hezbollah in the summer of 2006. However, many of the 44 teams doing the work will have to lay down their metal detectors at the end of August due to lack of funds, according to Dalya Farran, spokeswoman for the UN Mine Action Coordination Centre (MACC). "Our productivity in clearing contaminated areas will be cut by 50 percent at the end of the month when the teams stop their work," Farran said, adding that the 2008 budget was short 4.7 million dollars. "And 2009 is a whole other story. Without funding, we will have to stop all the teams," she said.

The teams working alongside the Lebanese army and UN forces comprise around 1,000 people, most of them Lebanese. The work is dangerous -- in the two years since the war's end, 27 civilians and 13 deminers have been killed and 234 civilians and 39 deminers wounded as a result of cluster bombs and unexploded ordnance, according to MACC. Farran said 1,058 sites contaminated by cluster bombs and unexploded ordnance from the 2006 war had been identified. The combined area of the sites totals around 41 square kilometres (16 square miles).