Having long since cleared the village of Yohmor's public areas and streets, MAG is now focusing on making private land safe enough for reconstruction, or activities such as farming that so many of the residents rely on for income generation.
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| A MAG technician pictured clearing farmer Hajj Hussein Olleik's land in June of this year |
Yohmor, a village in Southern Lebanon about five kilometres from the border with Israel, has a long and turbulent history of conflict. Just a few kilometres to the northeast, the remains of Beaufort Castle overlook the town.
Built during medieval times by the Crusaders, it has seen occupation by various armies, including Saladin, the Ottomans, the French, the Palestinians and the Israelis. It was one of the best preserved Crusader castles in existence, until being heavily damaged by battles in the 1980s and dynamite in 2000.
Yohmor was hit by several types of explosive ordnance, including artillery shells and air-dropped bombs, and the village was littered from one end to the other with unexploded cluster munitions.
A line of houses along the main road had been destroyed in an air strike, and the rubble that was left in the road hid deadly surprises, in the form of unexploded M42, M46 and M77 cluster submunitions.
In the days following the end of the war, there were two fatalities and three injuries as residents attempted to clear the land, including the death of one man who tried to clear the entrance to the cemetery to bury another victim of the war.
Each of the families who returned to their homes in Yohmor after fleeing during the war faced profound and frightening changes. The Zhours, for example, found an unexploded rocket in a bedroom of their partially destroyed home that contained hundreds of unexploded bomblets. The Olleik sisters, Sukna and Khadeeja, returned to a completely destroyed house and a field full of cluster submunitions.
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| The remains of Beaufort Castle... |
...and the village of Yohmor, September 2007 |
Statistically, 260 of the 600 homes in Yohmor were heavily damaged, meaning that almost half of Yohmor’s 5,000 residents were homeless.
MAG was among the first agencies on the scene, and took part in the emergency clearance of dangerous remnants of conflict in the days immediately following the ceasefire.
One year on, having long ago cleared public areas and streets in Yohmor, MAG is now focusing on making private land safe enough for reconstruction or livelihood activities, such as farming, that so many of the residents rely on for income generation.
Besides MAG’s traditional visual and electronic subsurface clearance, the teams also use mechanical means (in the form of an excavator fitted with a specially developed sifting bucket and an armoured cab) to pick through the rubble to find unexploded ordnance.
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| Villager Hajj Hussein at his house... | ...and his MAG-cleared land |
One of the houses presently under construction belongs to Hajj Hussein Olleik, an elderly farmer living with his wife. His two-storey house was one in the line of homes that was destroyed, and he returned to find nothing but rubble and cluster bombs.
“They were spread as if someone had been planting bombs instead of seeds,” he said. The area was cleared by MAG during the summer of 2007, allowing the family to start constructing a new, smaller one-storey house in August. Hajj Hussein is thankful to all who have helped him through difficult times. “I feel completely safe now,” he added.
There is a steady hum of activity as workers rebuild homes. So far, MAG has worked at seven Cluster Bomb Unit strike locations, and has destroyed 1,407 submunitions. There is still much work to do, but the town is returning to life.
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