UNITED NATIONS, Nov 22: Israel engaged in `a significant pattern of excessive, indiscriminate and disproportionate force’ against Lebanese civilians that amounted to `a flagrant violation’ of international law during the invasion of Lebanon in July, said a UN report released on Tuesday.

“Cumulatively, the deliberate and lethal attacks” by the Israeli forces against civilians and infrastructure `amounted to collective punishment’, the investigators, who were appointed by the United Nations Human Rights Council, wrote in a draft report.

The investigators focused specifically on Israel’s use of large numbers of cluster bombs, saying that 90 percent of them were dropped in the final three days of the month-long conflict.

Cluster bombs are not prohibited in warfare, but much controversy surrounds them because they disperse many small `bomblets’ that explode over a wide area and may strike unintended targets.

In addition, some bomblets do not explode when they hit the ground, and effectively become land mines that can be detonated unwittingly by civilians long after fighting has stopped.

“Their use was excessive, and not justified by any reason of military necessity,” the investigators wrote. They concluded that `these weapons were used deliberately to turn large areas of fertile agricultural land into “no go areas” for the civilian population’.

The dropping of cluster bombs also `amounted to a de facto scattering of anti-personnel mines across wide tracts of Lebanese lands’.

The New York Times said on Monday the Israeli military chief of staff, Lt Gen Dan Halutz, had ordered an inquiry to determine whether the military had followed his orders when it used cluster bombs.

Gen Halutz visited an army base on Monday and told Army Radio: “One of the things that must be investigated is the way in which the orders were given and implemented.”

The United Nations Mine Action Coordination Centre has estimated that Israel fired as many as four million cluster `submunitions’ (cluster bomblets), and that almost one million may not have detonated.