NO HAVEN IN A CITY PARALYZED BY DREAD
By Anthony Shadid
Washington Post
July 20, 2006
Tyre, Lebanon, July 19 -- Soon after dawn Wednesday, Ibrahim Khalil
Heidar readied his green
Mercedes. His wife, son and daughter-in-law climbed in, carrying no
more than would fit in the
trunk. Their neighbors, among them eight women and four children,
piled into two other cars, a
white and a blue Mercedes. On the roof of each vehicle, they
carefully tied a white sheet that rippled in the morning breeze.
A universal message, it was their plea for protection.
They then left their small border town of Aitaroun, already barraged
by Israeli airstrikes,
and made for Tyre, and safety. But little around them was safe. A
bomb-hewn crater blocked one
road. A detour brought them to another crater. "Around and around"
they drove, Heidar
recalled, before they reached a narrow, buckling road an hour later
that ran along a grove of ripening lemons bordered by stately
pines.
"We didn't hear anything until the missiles struck us," the
75-year-old Heidar said. "One, two, three -- I have no idea."
>From his hospital bed in Tyre, he shook his head at a memory just a
few hours old.
"God help us," he said.
In more than a week of Israeli airstrikes, his home of southern
Lebanon has shattered like a
china plate. Among its shards are the broken lives of tens of
thousands of people fleeing
villages such as Aitaroun, and tens of thousands more stranded in
Tyre, a besieged city spread
out along the Mediterranean Sea where aid and hospital officials say
a humanitarian disaster is unfolding.
Red Cross officials here said scores of people were killed in
attacks across the south on
Tuesday. With roads under threat of attack, they said, the office's
five ambulances couldn't
reach villages, leaving victims buried under the rubble. Braving the
shelling that residents
describe as random, cars flew white flags from antennas, rolled-up
windows, sunroofs or hand-held flagpoles.
Civil defense workers, too scared to venture out in firetrucks, had
to leave a rotting corpse
in a humid sun along one road. His bloodied head was propped against
the window of his car,
struck on Tuesday. Clothes spilled out of torn suitcases in the
trunk; on the ground lay pink and blue baby shirts.
Tyre, a city of 60,000 before the war, 12 miles north of the Israeli
border, is paralyzed by
fear and dread. Hundreds of people have fled to the Tyre Rest House,
a beachfront hotel,
hoping for an evacuation. The city itself is deserted: No shop is
open; few cars ply the
streets, which are strewn here and there with rubble. In a traffic
circle, a horse lazily
grazed on grass, as a lonesome car alarm pierced the afternoon sky,
drowned out every so often
by the trail of Israeli jets and the thud of bombing.
Rumors swirl: that Israeli agents are on the ground marking targets,
that in 24 hours there will be no way out left.
"It's not the end. This is only the beginning," said Katya Taleb,
who got married last month.
"It's the beginning of the end."
The road into Tyre hugs a coast under blockade by the Israeli navy.
A scarred landscape
unfurls. Virtually every bridge is destroyed. A white Mercedes, its
windows shattered, is
perched along one; several cars are abandoned near a cemetery. Bombs
have etched craters along
the highway, spraying the asphalt like buckshot. Livestock sits
untended in a corral;
watermelons and tomatoes rot at fruit stands. At one spot, a gaggle
of African workers with
nowhere to go stared blankly at the occasional passing car.
"Here we must drive quickly," said Daee Mansour, a 31-year-old hired
driver with a long beard,
barreling along a stretch of road exposed to the Israeli warships at
sea.
A green medallion hung from his rearview mirror. "Mohammed," it
read.
"God loves me, and I love God," said Mansour, a father of two.
Then he turned more serious: "I have young. They have to eat. I
don't like it, but if I don't work, they don't live."
Oncoming cars, speeding at 80, maybe 90 mph, flashed their
headlights as a warning. In the
distance, smoke rose from the road after it was struck by a shell.
Cars screeched into a
U-turn, then sped off in the other direction. At times, drivers
flagged other drivers. "What's
the best way to Beirut?" one shouted. Another, stranded, yelled:
"Please help me! Please! I need a mechanic."
Along a dirt road crossing the Hasbaya River, a car had collided
with a telephone pole.
"You have to have tough nerves so this doesn't happen," Mansour
said.
"Scary," he then kept repeating under his breath. "Scary."
A crater sits at the entrance to Tyre, mounds of asphalt and dirt
gathered beneath apartment
buildings with shattered windows. Awnings hang in the geometry of
destruction. Every so often,
a group of mainly young men sits inside the entrance of an apartment
building. Otherwise, the
streets are given over to stray dogs. On one stood Mohammed Rahhal,
a 25-year-old laborer.
"We're catching the worst of it -- day and night, night and day," he
said.
Crusted blood was still on Rahhal's ear, a wound he'd suffered a day
before when an Israeli
air raid targeted a building next to his masonry workshop. "The
Israelis want to empty the south so that they can destroy it," he
said.
Since Tuesday, hundreds from the city and its hinterland have fled
to the Tyre Rest House, a
low-slung, once-pleasant resort. Every room is filled, and the
lobby, sidewalk, beach and
promenade are crowded with people, along with four U.N. armored
vehicles and an ambulance.
Most people have foreign passports, and U.N. officials here are
trying to organize an
evacuation that may begin as early as Thursday. In the meantime,
information has been scarce,
leading to even more fear that some will be left behind.
"We want to leave, but there's no way out," said Sabina Hijazi, with
her four children between the ages of 2 and 13.
She started crying, and her words poured out. The bombing terrified
her children;
occasionally, it shook her house. No banks are open, so she can get
no money. Nor are the
shops, so no food. Her son is sick, but she's too scared to venture
out to the hospital.
"What can I do?" Hijazi asked. "How can I get my children out of
here? If we can't leave, we're left facing death."
Hospital officials estimated that perhaps 12,000 people have already
left the city, maybe
more. About 15,000 poured in before the roads became too dangerous.
Ali Mroue, 15, said his
family had spent most of the time since then in the basement, with
75 others. During the
fiercest barrages, the children cried, and parents recited verses of
the Koran or read to themselves quietly.
Across the city, families are relying on what they had stocked
before the fighting began --
bread, beans, milk, sugar, cheese and lunchmeat. Electricity was cut
on the second day,
spoiling some of the food, and water followed. The sick are running
short of medicine. In
attacks that have left residents bewildered, a private school was
bombed, as was the civil defense headquarters and fire station.
"It's hell," said Taleb, the newlywed.
"The attacks are absolutely random," said her husband, Ali. "They
don't discriminate. They don't have any goal."
Next to Taleb was Martha Dubois, the French principal of the private
school that was bombed.
One of her students, 14-year-old Saraya Baydoun, walked by, her face
cut when a bomb hurled
debris near her house. Dubois had not seen her in days.
"Sweetheart, you're okay!" she said, hugging her.
At the small Red Cross office, its five ambulances parked outside,
frustration reigned as many
of its 50 volunteers sat idly. On this day, they were especially
upset about the events in the
nearby village of Srifa, where the office's director, Sami Yazbak,
said bombing had collapsed
20 houses and buildings. One ambulance had made the perilous trek,
and its crew estimated that between 60 and 80 people were still
buried there.
"We're not sure if they're dead or alive," Yazbak said. "No one can
get there and take them
out from under the rubble. It's not just Srifa. It's all the
villages. Sometimes people are
still alive, but there's no way to get to them. You just can't help
them."
He looked over a map, roads to the largest villages highlighted in
black.
"Every day is getting worse than the day before," he said.
One volunteer, Qassem Shallan, said he had taken a call from an
elderly couple in the village
of Byut al-Sayyid. They pleaded for the Red Cross to pick them up,
to bring them water, to deliver medication for the woman's high
blood pressure.
"I started crying," he said. "There's no way to get there. I don't
know if she's still alive."
At Najm Hospital, doctors who had been working eight days straight
said they were running low
on antibiotics, gasoline for the generator, oxygen, suture, cotton
and gauze. All complained that they had not slept since the
fighting began.
Ali Najm, a 35-year-old radiologist, beckoned a visitor into a small
room.
"Here, I want to show you something," he said.
Najm knocked, then gingerly opened the door. Inside was his wife,
8-year-old son and
11-year-old daughter, along with his sister-in-law and her three
children, all of whom have
been sharing a cramped room for a week now, deeming the hospital
safer. Milk bottles were
strewn on a table for his 3-month-old niece. His son was sprawled
out on the leather couch, napping. His nephew, 3, sat on a cushion
on the floor.
"This is how we live," Najm said.
"It's a horror movie," his wife, Irene, added.
"This has become a war much bigger than us," he said. " Haram : It's
a shame. How do you keep
looking at all this? The tears, the cries for help. I can't even
breathe anymore. The stress. Everything inside me is just worn
out."
A few rooms down was Heidar, the patriarch of the family whose cars
were attacked coming from Aitaroun on Wednesday.
On the road into Tyre, he had followed 100 yards behind the two
other cars. The missiles
struck those cars, and the survivors crawled out, clambering into
the lemon grove. Seeing the
blast, Heidar and his family followed them, abandoning their
Mercedes.
"The bombing came right on top of us," he said.
A blast severed his left pinkie finger, cut his back and broke his
foot. He crawled over to
his daughter-in-law, Insaf, who was also wounded. His 71-year-old
wife, Leila, was stranded
farther away. Less than a minute later, there was another explosion.
His wife was so dismembered that the hospital had no corpse to bring
to the morgue. Three
others in the group died, including 31-year-old Ghassan Faqih, whose
3-year-old daughter,
Narjis, lay in another bed, staring at the ceiling. Her face was
peppered with blood.
"You see, my family." Heidar couldn't go on. His pale blue eyes
watered, and he swiped away dirt still in his gray hair from the
Israelis' attack.
"You have to ask them why," he said.
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[Peace without justice & equality is an explosion waiting to happen.
Justice without the pursuit of peace & equality is a torturous path to nowhere]
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