Lebanon Journal: Scenes from a war zone
In the mountains around Beirut, Christian villages normally full of tourists from the Gulf and Europe have seen their populations swell up to 10-fold. Entire villages in the south have decamped for places normally associated with luxury and sin: Broumana, Zahle, Jounieh. The Israelis Wednesday finally lifted the blockade on humanitarian relief supplies into Lebanon and some planes and ships have begun to arrive. Most of the supplies are headed south in convoys to Tyre and its surrounding villages, but soon these areas around Beirut will need supplies as well because their infrastructures are being badly taxed by the refugees.
Gasoline, bottled water, and most food items are holding out for now. Beirut has power and telephone service most of the day, but clearly the power plants are conserving fuel and shutting down for most daylight hours. Hezbollah TV remains on the air, broadcasting a combination of news shows and long, music-video-like documentaries about its fighters with lots of footage from battles in the 1990s.
Al-Hur, Hezbollah radio, is jammed by an Israeli voice speaking nearly perfect Arabic. "Where is Hassan Nasrallah? Why does he hide in a cave while you die?"
The approach to Tyre is littered with abandoned cars. The south ran out of affordable gasoline days ago, according to taxi drivers willing to stop even for a minute or two. The road into Tyre itself is cut, and a long detour through farmland shows dust-covered vehicles,more than a few of which look as though they were driven into walls and other roadside structures. Maybe from panicked driving, maybe to avoid artillery and air strikes. Some are burned.
The road resumes about 1 1/2 miles outside Tyre itself. It's deserted and punctuated with a 50-foot-plus crater maybe 15 feet deep. People can drive slowly around the outside of the crater. I can hear the hum of Predator drones overhead. The road runs along the sea where the string of beach bars and resorts have been closed. Israeli gunboats patrol this coastline, often shelling civilian traffic.
The crater is a good place to judge traffic out of Tyre and the refugee flow. It comes in spurts, flying down the straightaway out of town, slowing at the crater edge and then speeding away for the relative safety of Sidon and Beirut. "I will never come back. The country, it is not for us any longer!" shouts one man. "Nothing, there is nothing."
Nabatiya, some 15 miles north of the Israeli border, is a ghost town. It's been bombed heavily overnight and, by 11 a.m. Tuesday, the strikes are resuming on the low-lying ridges around the town of about 150,000.
Ragheh Hareb Hospital has an Iranian flag outside and is obviously run by Hezbollah and its humanitarian offices. Talking to Dr. Ahmed Tahir, we both duck when an Israeli jet swings low over the town and shoots a missile into the opposing ridgeline. It's apparently targeting a school affiliated with Hezbollah; we are told by some men that the school is used by fighters, or was. This is the third time it has been hit in the past couple of days.
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