A/HRC/2/7 page 13 51. The distinction between a categorical and a context-specific approach is crucial to evaluating Israel’s targeting practice during this conflict. For example, a road connecting southern Lebanon to the rest of the country could be considered to contribute to Hezbollah’s military action and a bridge along such a road may thus be a legitimate military objective.61 But no such justification is plausible for most other areas, including targets in areas inhabited by populations with no links to Hezbollah. The mission notes that such attacks on the transportation infrastructure have a particularly debilitating effect on the safe transportation of IDPs, the provision of humanitarian assistance and access to medical care. 4. The use of cluster bombs in southern Lebanon 52. The principal concern of many of the mission’s interlocutors in Lebanon was the massive use by IDF of cluster munitions and the ongoing impact of unexploded sub-munitions (bomblets) on the civilian population. 53. The United Nations Mine Action Coordination Centre (UNMACC) in Tyre had, as of 23 September 2006, recorded and confirmed 590 individual cluster bomb strike locations,62 mainly in built-up63 and agricultural areas, and UNMACC was continuing to discover additional strike locations. These unexploded bomblets are small, often difficult to spot and highly volatile. Between the end of the armed conflict and 26 September 2006, unexploded cluster bomb sub-munitions killed 14 and injured 90. 54. The available information is not sufficient to estimate the total number of bomblets with confidence or precision. The total number of bomblets - exploded and unexploded - could conceivably be as low as 158,000 or as high as 1,170,000. However, on the basis of the information available about the type of cluster munitions used by IDF, about the overall quantity of such weapons expended and the strike sites and bomblets found and destroyed, the mission finds the most likely estimate to be that between 850,000 and 1 million bomblets were expended. Depending on the failure (dud) rate, which appears to have been particularly high in this campaign, it is likely that between 170,000 and 340,000 unexploded bomblets were left in southern Lebanon. Some 15,000 bomblets had been found and eliminated at the time of the visit. 55. The justification given by the Government of Israel for the use of cluster bombs is that they were the most effective weapon against Hezbollah rocket launch sites. This argument is, in the abstract, compatible with a military rationale for the use of anti-personnel cluster bombs, as the radius of damage extends to the size of a football field and thus is able to neutralize mobile rocket launchers. The IDF interlocutors of the mission did not provide any information that would confirm that these weapons were in practice used in a manner consistent with this military rationale. 56. Regardless of whether the military rationale was sound, the use of cluster munitions was inconsistent with principles of distinction and proportionality. Israel could not reasonably have been ignorant of the fact that the sub-munitions dispersed by cluster munitions have a high failure (dud) rate. In effect, then, the decision was taken to blanket an area occupied by large numbers of civilians with small and volatile explosives. The impact of these bomblets would obviously be indiscriminate and the incidental effects on civilians would almost certainly be disproportionate. Nothing the mission heard from IDF suggests that their long-term effects on the civilian population was considered problematic before the decision to use cluster munitions