A view of the destruction wrecked by Israel on a south Lebanon village. (Reuters)

GENEVA — Israel's 33-day onslaught has brought Lebanon's 15-year economic and development drive to square one, the UN development agency said Tuesday, August 22, amid expectations that the Mediterranean environmental disaster caused by striking a Lebanese fuel depot could take no less than a year.

"Fifteen years of work have been wiped out in a month," Jean Fabre, a spokesman for the UN Development Program (UNDP), was quoted by Agence France-Presse (AFP) as telling reporters.

"The damage is such that the last 15 years of work on reconstruction and rehabilitation, following the previous problems that Lebanon experienced, are now annihilated," he averred.

Lebanon's relatively healthy progress towards the United Nations' Millennium Development Goals, which cover a range of social and economic targets, "have been brought back to zero," the UN official said.

Fabre estimated that overall Lebanese economic losses from the month-long war totaled "at least 15 billion dollars, if not more."

Lebanese authorities estimated last week that direct structural damage inflicted by the Israeli offensive reached 3.6 billion dollars, including 15,000 housing units, 80 bridges and 94 roads destroyed or damaged.

About 35,000 homes and businesses were destroyed, while a quarter of the country's road bridges or flyovers were shattered, according to the UNDP's initial estimate.

Hizbullah leader Hassan Nasrallah vowed on August 15 that his group will rebuild 15,000 homes demolished by the Israeli military juggernaut and house hundreds of thousands of civilians displaced by the war.

Water Shortage

The most urgent issues are the need for clean water and sanitation and to clear unexploded munitions, relief agencies said Tuesday.

Underground water pipes and sewers were destroyed in 10 out of 12 war-struck communities visited by the UN Children's Fund in recent days, and a similar scale of damage was reported elsewhere.

"Everywhere we go... everybody is talking about water and the need for it," said Paul Sherlock, a UNICEF water specialist.

To stave off more immediate needs, 100,000 liters of bottled water will be delivered every week to villages in southern Lebanon where thousands of people have returned to their homes, the agency said.

Temporary water tanks will gradually be set up in Nabatiyeh and villages along the Israeli border until water systems are restored.

"There's a huge job to be done on the infrastructure," Sherlock expected.

"But access to water also runs into the problem with unexploded ordnance, because you have to dig among the rubble to sort pipe work out, so it's a very dangerous game right now," said the UNICEF specialist.

At least five Lebanese children were killed in recent days when they picked up unexploded munitions, and more than a dozen have been injured, UNICEF said.

Thousands of unexploded bomblets left over by Israeli forces have turned many areas in south Lebanon into virtual minefields.

Oil Slip

A Lebanese man looks at a thick layer of oil covering the water at a small port at the ancient city of Byblos.

In another aspect of the Israeli crimes, the environmental group Greenpeace Mediterranean expected Tuesday the cleaning up the massive oil spill caused by the Israeli bombing of a Lebanese fuel depot to take up to one year.

"Cleanup could take between six months and a year depending on how quickly an assessment is done and cleanup begins in earnest," Zeina Al Hajj, Greenpeace's Beirut coordinator, told reporters.

The United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) estimates that between 10,000 and 15,000 tones of fuel oil spilled onto Lebanon's coast after Israel bombed Jiyyeh power station, 50 kilometers south of Beirut, causing the biggest ecological crisis in the country's history.

The spill has polluted about 150 kilometers (93 miles) of the Lebanese coast and spread north into Syrian waters, according to UNEP.

Al Hajj said that while no mass fish deaths were evident under the water, oysters, crabs and fish on shore have been found covered in oil which sank to the seabed.

The Nairobi-based UNEP said Monday that Israeli authorities had given safety assurances for aerial UN surveillance missions over the Lebanese coast to determine the scope of the oil spill.

The aerial surveys and a joint effort to clean up to 30 coastal sites in Lebanon were part of a recovery plan unveiled last week by senior officials from the UN, EU and regional states meeting in Greece.

The operation would cost at least 50 million euros (64 million dollars).

More oil has already spilled from the Jiyyeh plant than leaked from the Erika oil tanker into the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of France in 1999.

European and Lebanese teams working in Jbeil, north of the capital Beirut, have already recovered about 100 tones of spilled oil, a fraction of the total.