A senior U.S. official said on Thursday that U.S.-funded teams are making "a lot of progress" in removing unexploded munitions left over from the recent Lebanon war.

"The effort to remove the unexploded ordnance is moving along very aggressively and we're really making a lot of progress," Randall Tobias, the State Department's director of foreign assistance, told a news briefing on the status of U.S.-funded reconstruction efforts in Lebanon.

Tobias, who visited Lebanon late last month, said U.S.-funded teams had removed or assisted in the removal of about 50,000 pieces of unexploded ordnance left from the July-August war between Israel and the Hezbollah militia in Lebanon.

This was double the amount of munitions cleared over a two-year period in Kosovo following the 1999 conflict in the Serbian province, Tobias said.

However, Tobias's claim of significant progress contrasted with a UN complaint last week that Israel's failure to provide detailed maps of where its forces dropped so-called "cluster bombs" in Lebanon had hamstrung clearance operations.

The cluster bombs each spread hundreds of tiny bomblets designed to kill enemy troops.

Israel reportedly dropped more than 1.2 million mainly U.S.- made bomblets on Lebanon during the month-long war with Lebanon's Hezbollah militia. Thousands of the bomblets dropped onto southern Lebanon failed to explode on impact.

It was reported that at least 22 people have been killed and 135 wounded by unexploded bomblets since the month-long war ended on August 14.

Source: Xinhua