In an interview with AFP, a senior Israeli commander detailed the efforts his unit was undertaking even as the Middle East war raged on.

"When the war is over, probably we'll find in hotels, in hospitals, schools areas, a lot of small bombs that we did not see or heard about during the war", said Colonel Jonathan Raz, head of Israel's central Ghanim district of the Home Front Command, the military arm in charge of civilian preparedness during a war.

Israel says cluster munitions launched by Iran over its territory have caused numerous impacts and may have scattered unexploded ordnance over several kilometres.

Cluster munitions, which Iran and Israel have previously accused each other of using, explode in mid-air and scatter bomblets across a wide area.

Raz said that his agency's teams accompany police bomb disposal squads to impact sites to identify the type of munitions involved and search for additional bomblets in the case of cluster munitions.

"It's after the hitting that we know whether or not it's a cluster missile", he said, adding that the missile that struck the Bnei Brak area on Sunday carried "around 24 little bombs".

"Then we search all over the area. It's dozens of kilometres. We search, and we know what happened and how many (bomblets) we need to find on top of those we did not find at the scene", he told AFP.

On Sunday, at least eight people were injured in Israel following repeated missile launches from Iran, including two of which contained cluster munitions according to Israeli authorities.

On Monday, Israeli authorities reported another site struck by a cluster bomb in the city of Rishon LeZion.

Raz said that nine or 10 missiles carrying cluster munitions had hit his district since the start of the war with Iran on February 28, amounting to "hundreds" of disseminated bombs.

- 'Like a minefield' -

During the 12-day war between Iran and Israel in June 2025, rights group Amnesty International said the Islamic republic used cluster munitions at least three times, based on analysis of photos and videos, as well as media reports.

Israel too has used cluster munitions against its foes, and in 2007 a US government investigation found that it had probably violated arms export agreements when it dropped US-made cluster bombs in Lebanon during its war with the militant group Hezbollah.

More than 100 countries have signed the Convention on Cluster Munitions, adopted in 2008 after the Israel-Hezbollah war in Lebanon, which bans the use, transfer, production and stockpiling of cluster bombs.

Neither Israel nor Iran has ratified the convention.

Human Rights Watch last week accused Israel of unlawfully using white phosphorus over residential parts of a southern Lebanese town earlier in the war.

Raz, the Israeli commander, said most cluster bomblets detonate either in mid-air or when they hit the ground. On Sunday his team discovered one unexploded ordnance, he said.

"It's like a minefield in the street among the people. It scares us because we know how to deal with a scene where it had exploded (but) we do not know where is the scene when it has not," he said.

Cluster munitions dramatically increase the workload of bomb disposal units and Home Front Command teams, he said, because responders must ensure that no unexploded bomblets remain and that no victims are missing across multiple impact sites.

"It's difficult to understand because everybody call the police or the firefighter and say to them 'the bomb hit my building'," Raz said.