Israel's measured response included violating the Geneva conventions

Cluster bombs are nasty little bastards. They are designed primarily as anti-vehicle or anti-personnel land mines. The primary purpose is to deny an enemy the use of an area by making mobility across the mined area nearly impossible.

That's all very tidy except for a few little problems. Cluster bombs are indiscriminate. Deployed from a single shell there may be up to 600 of the small, but lethal, explosive devices scattered over an area as large as a couple of football fields. The other problem is the failure rate of the bomblets. More than 26 percent of the munitions do not arm making them highly unpredictable and dangerous.

Because they are indiscriminate ordnance the use of cluster munitions in or around civilians is prohibited under the Geneva Conventions. Despite what some people may say, there is no other prohibition on the use of cluster munitions except for that caveat.

All that said, using cluster munitions for any purpose but to stop an advancing enemy is misuse. Countries selling and procuring cluster munitions are generally held to conditions which specify the precise use of such weapons.

So then this appears:

Israel may have misused American-made cluster bombs in civilian areas of Lebanon during its war against Hezbollah last summer, the State Department said Monday.

The department's spokesman, Sean McCormack, said a preliminary report on a U.S. investigation of the issue had been sent to Congress. He declined to provide details of the investigation.

The United Nations said last summer that unexploded cluster bombs — anti- personnel weapons that spray bomblets over a wide area — litter homes, gardens and highways across southern Lebanon.

When Israel buys cluster bombs and other lethal equipment from the United States, it must agree in writing to restrictions on their use.

The report, McCormack said, "is not a final judgment." He declined to speculate on what action might be taken against Israel if Congress determined that a violation had been committed. He also said that U.S. agreements about the use of munitions were classified.

Hold it right there. The last time Israel went at Lebanon, in 1982, they indiscriminately employed cluster munitions, despite the fact that Israel had signed an agreement with the US to use them only in specific circumstances and not against civilian targets. That caused the US to ban the sale of cluster munitions to Israel for six years.

What genius in the US State Department believed they wouldn't do it again?

The Israeli method of delivery has been artillery. They used shells, with 500 to 600 bomblets each, in a six round salvo delivering about 3000 to 3600 individual mines onto a footprint of about 1200 square meters. Post-conflict assessments have found unexploded cluster munitions on roads, in farmers' fields and on houses. 30 people have died since the end of the conflict as a result of encountering unexploded ordnance (UXO), all of them due to cluster munitions.

There is also a requirement for combatants to clean up the explosive remnants of war after the conflict has ended. You don't get to leave your nasty bits of explosives laying around on the ground. Israel, because they had to withdraw from South Lebanon, isn't doing the clean-up. The UN Mine Action Service is doing the job and the de-miners are finding that the patterns of cluster munitions footprints indicate Israel was blatantly indiscriminate in the use of cluster munitions and the area of contagion is all of South Lebanon generally.

Now the US is getting all righteous over Israel's likely violation of the ban on indiscriminate use of cluster munitions. Really.

What did they expect?!