To cope with the demand, the Canadian-financed Lebanese Welfare Association for the Handicapped has opened a new center in the southern market town of Nabatiyeh, in an area that bore the brunt of Israel's July-August offensive.

"Since our center opened in Nabatiyeh (two days ago) we have already had 35 requests for prosthetic arms and legs," said the center's director Bassam Singer.

Also, a center opened in the coastal town of Sarafand after Israel's 1996 Grapes of Wrath bombardment of southern Lebanon, saw a huge increase in demand for prosthetics in the aftermath of the 34-day war with Hezbollah in 2006.

"The Sarafand prosthetic center is overwhelmed with people seeking limbs," said director Talal Berri.

Cluster munitions spread bomblets over a wide area from a single container. The bomblets often do not explode on impact, but can do so later at the slightest touch, making them similar to anti-personnel landmines.

It is thought that up to 40 percent of the bombs did not explode when they hit the ground, becoming deadly traps for the unwary.

Singer and Berri both say they continue to see a steady stream of casualties from the unexploded bomblets, mines, shells and rockets that litter the fields and villages of southern Lebanon, often concealed under rubble.

Legs are much more in demand than arms, as most of the bomblets detonate under foot, shattering the lower limbs.

Doctors have carried out more than 170 amputations since the start of the war on July 12, 75 of them since fighting ended on August 14, Berri said.

Dalya Farran, spokeswoman for the U.N. Mine Action Coordination Center, said around one million unexploded bomblets remain scattered around the south.

That figure comes on top of around half-a-million mainly anti-personnel mines left by Israeli troops when they withdrew from southern Lebanon in 2000.

Farran says 222 people -- including 190 civilians, the rest soldiers or deminers -- have been killed or wounded by bomblets and mines over the last six months. Of the wounded civilians, 110 need prosthetic limbs.

According to a tally, 27 people have been killed by unexploded ordnance since the end of the 2006 war.

The war victims aid group Handicap International says 98 percent of cluster bomb victims are civilians. Last year it said that of 11,044 cases recorded in 23 countries, just 125 were military and another 59 were deminers.

"My son stepped on a bomblet when he was going to help people while working for the civil defense during last summer's war," says the mother of Mohammed Nahle, 31, leaning on her for support as he learns to use his artificial limb.

Hussein Jawad, 42, has come here (to Sarafand) to find a replacement for his arm that was torn off in an Israeli air strike as he delivered bread in the southern village of Bayyada.

A new limb costs between 1,000 and 1,800 dollars, a fortune for most inhabitants of southern Lebanon where the economy is still reeling from the Israeli bombardment.

The victims have paid the entire cost of the limbs themselves, although a few of them have secured funding from relatives, friends or charities

Top Picture: Mohammed Nahle (C) sits next to fellow victims of cluster bombs at a center for rehabilitation in the Lebanese southern village of Sarafand.

A Lebanese man wounded by a cluster bomb, looks at artificial limbs at a rehabilitation center in the southern Lebanese village Sarafand, 06 March 2007. Prosthetics are increasingly in demand in southern Lebanon as villagers are injured with more frequency by unexploded cluster bombs and mines leftover from the July-August 2006 Israeli offensive on Lebanon

A Lebanese doctor checks the amputated limb of a Lebanese man, who lost his leg to a cluster bomb, at a center for rehabilitation in the southern village of Sarafand

Sources: Naharnet, Ya Libnan