(Adds Hezbollah paragraph 7) GENEVA, Nov 2 (Reuters) - Civilians, a quarter of them children, make up almost all the victims of cluster bombs over the last three decades, a humanitarian agency said on Thursday. In a study of 24 countries and regions, Handicap International said the controversial weapons, which it wants banned, had killed, wounded or maimed 11,044 people of whom 98 percent were civilians. The under-reporting of victims in such places as Afghanistan, Iraq and Vietnam meant the real total could be almost 10 times higher, it said. Some 27 percent of the victims were children, mainly boys, who were working or playing in areas where unexploded munitions pose a permanent threat to civilians. "For 30 years governments have failed to address the disproportionate, long-term harm these weapons cause to civilian populations," Angelo Simonazzi, the agency's director general, said in a statement. Cluster bombs, which scatter huge number of munitions over wide areas, were recently used by Israel in its month-long war in Lebanon against Hezbollah guerrillas. Hezbollah also fired them in the July 12-Aug. 14 conflict, although on a far smaller scale, and the increasing use of the weapon by guerrilla groups was worrying, the agency said. United Nations estimates 100,000 cluster bomblets failed to explode in Lebanon, with most landing during the final 72 hours of the war. Handicap International says cluster munitions still cause between two and three casualties a day in south Lebanon. Other places covered by the report, which the agency said was the first attempt to collate data about cluster bomb victims worldwide, included Chad, Laos, the Russian region of Chechnya and Kosovo. Cluster bombs were first designed after World War Two for possible use against any Soviet invasion across the wide open plains of western Europe. The global stockpile is estimated at some four billion munitions, with around a quarter in U.S. hands. Handicap International is one of a number of organisations calling for an end to the use of cluster munitions along the lines of the 1997 prohibition on anti-personnel mines. But so far Belgium is the only country to ban them.
