Sappers are working to clear the land of a deadly past.
foreignpolicy.com
From 1975 to 1990, Lebanon fought a civil war, during which Israel occupied large portions of southern Lebanon and left hundreds of thousands of anti-personnel and anti-tank mines on Lebanese territory along the two countries’ shared 75-mile border.
In 2006, a monthlong war between the Lebanese militia Hezbollah and Israel led Israel to drop as many as 4 million cluster munitions on Lebanon, roughly 90 percent of them in the final three days of fighting. As they fall to the ground, cluster bombs release a multitude of smaller explosives over a broad area. An estimated 1 million of these did not explode. The deadly metal containers are the size of a can of soda and can lay dormant on the ground for years.