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Israel Lebanon conflict has not spared marine life

  • 29/09/2006

The oil slick off the Lebanese coast, caused by Israel's bombing of a power plant in mid-July, has begun sinking. Greenpeace's recent video footage showed dead fish at the sea bottom near Beirut, where large amount of sunken slick coated 83.6 sq m of seabed. The environmental group thus says that just cleaning up the shoreline is not sufficient and the seabed needs immediate attention as well. Meanwhile, a Lebanese environmentalist group, Bahr Loubnan, quoted by Reuters, has played down the oil slick's impact on marine life. The oil spill has badly hit shellfish, fish larvae and baby turtles that live on the shoreline, but larger fish have survived unscathed as they migrated to deeper waters where the oil is not mixing.

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