The International Committee of the Red Cross called on Monday on all states to ban immediately the use of 'inaccurate and unreliable' cluster bombs, responsible for killing and maiming countless civilians.
Red Cross official Philip Spoerri also called on states "to prohibit the targeting of cluster munitions against military objectives located in a populated area."
He urged states to eliminate stocks of cluster bombs "and, pending their destruction, not to transfer such weapons to other countries."
The proposals are to be formally presented at a review conference on the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons which begins here on Tuesday, said Spoerri, head of international law and co-operation at the Red Cross.
The munitions can contain up to 650 smaller bombs which scatter and explode on impact. According to the NGO, between 95 and 98 percent of such munitions are neither reliable nor accurate, with anywhere from 10-40 percent of the so-called sub-munitions scattered by the mother bomb failing to explode, the ICRC said.
Often dropped via parachute, the accuracy of the weapons is highly dependent of wind and weather conditions, and often drop far from the intended target zone, affecting several thousand square metres of territory, the organisation said.
It said that in nearly every conflict in which they have been used, significant numbers of cluster munitions have failed to detonate, leaving a long-term legacy of contamination which continue to kill and maim civilians years later.
But a US official said a new agreement was not necessary. "We don't think the new rules are really needed," the senior American delegate said on condition of anonymity.
Cluster bombs allow the US to protect large sites, such as aerodromes, without needing to use large quantities of explosives, the source explained.
If such cluster bombs were banned, he argued, combatants could resort to even more destructive weapons.
The ICRC pointed out that the use of such arms by the Israeli military in Lebanon seemed unprecedented.
According to Handicap International, the Israelis used four million cluster bombs, of which up to 1.6 million failed to explode.
At least 20 people have been killed and 120 injured by residual cluster bombs since the August 14 cease-fire, it said last week.
The aid group estimated that more than 10,000 people had been killed or maimed by cluster bombs world-wide over the past 30 years.
It said 98 percent of the victims were civilians, adding that the total number of cases could be far higher -- up to 100,000 -- due to the difficulty of collecting data in conflict zones.