- Cluster munitions are weapons that disperse many small bombs, often called “bomblets,” to kill and destroy across a wide area.
- Because cluster munitions are designed to kill indiscriminately and many of the bomblets fail to explode upon impact, continuing to pose a danger to civilians for decades, their use is banned under the Convention on Cluster Munitions. Israel is not a signatory to the convention.
- The Israeli military has repeatedly used cluster munitions illegally in populated areas of Lebanon going back decades, including during its attacks and invasions in 1978, 1982, 2006, and 2025.
- Israel’s use of them in Lebanon in the 1970s and 1980s in violation of U.S. law caused President Jimmy Carter and President Ronald Reagan to cut off transfers of cluster munitions to Israel.
- In 2006, the Israeli military fired an estimated 4 million cluster bomblets in southern Lebanon in just over a month, the vast majority in the final three days of the war when Israel knew a ceasefire was imminent. According to Human Rights Watch, Israel used cluster munitions “in a manner that did not discriminate between military objectives and civilians.” Up to a million of the bomblets that did not detonate upon impact were strewn across cities and towns in southern Lebanon, killing more than 400 civilians in the following years.
- In 2008, Human Rights Watch released a report on Israel’s use of cluster bombs in Lebanon in 2006, which noted:
- “A senior Human Rights Watch military analyst who arrived in south Lebanon immediately after the ceasefire had surveyed cluster munitions on the ground in both Kosovo and Iraq. The sheer number and density of dud fields in urban areas dwarfed anything he had ever seen before.”
The report concluded: “Israel violated international humanitarian law in its indiscriminate and disproportionate cluster munition attacks on Lebanon.”