Lebanon: life on the ground

1. WARFARE IN THE MIDDLE EAST
At the Epicenter of War, a City of Rubble
After days of Israeli shelling, survivors in the south Lebanon town of Bint Jbeil emerge from the ruins shaken and starving.
By Megan K. Stack (from LA Times)

BINT JBEIL, Lebanon — Smeared with dirt and covered in flies, the woman sat dazed and stranded in the rubble for days. When she looked up Monday to see people from the outside world approaching through the morning heat, the words tumbled from between her broken teeth.

"God brought you," said Libi Ibrahim, blinking into the sun. "I didn't want to die alone. Don't leave me."

A drive into the bombravaged town of Bint Jbeil is a voyage into the ugly epicenter of the war between Israel and Hezbollah. A short distance from the Israeli border, this village of rolling hills and olive groves has suffered some of the fiercest fighting of this sudden conflict. Now the town is a wrecked and ghostly place; the days of Israeli shelling and airstrikes laid the town center to waste.

It's impossible to tell where the streets used to dip and twist through the shops and homes in the heart of downtown; roads have been washed out by wreckage. Mangled buildings form artificial hills, jagged with broken glass, punctuated occasionally by a mosque minaret or a singed palm tree poking lopsided toward the sky. Mosques, shops, homes — all were hammered.

The weakest, it seemed, were left to endure the attacks: elderly and disabled, shellshocked and starving, they came clambering out of the ruins. Their transistor radios had brought word that Israel had declared a temporary halt to bombardments. Entire families emerged from basements and caves and picked their way carefully through the chunks of rubble, sometimes barefooted.

Ibrahim had been sleeping in a shadowy doorway of charred cinder blocks for six days, she reckoned. She was too confused to explain what she'd done before that. She had been drinking muddy water. She was nearly deaf from the bombings.

A widow, Ibrahim has a grown daughter in Beirut, but had no way to reach the capital. She couldn't even make it up the street, washed over by tumbled walls, fallen power lines and broken glass. When she tried to walk, she fell down.

"I'm an old woman," she said. "I get tangled up in the electrical wires and the stones."

Israel for days warned residents to leave the area before sending in ground troops to take this town, a Hezbollah stronghold and the source of many cross-border rocket salvos. But Hezbollah fighters who apparently had hidden in fortified bunkers ambushed the soldiers, killing eight. After that, Israel switched to a massive rocket and artillery campaign that pulverized broad swaths of the town.

It is impossible to know how many people died in Bint Jbeil. Although at least one body came to light Monday, nobody has begun the job of combing through the rubble for corpses. They have barely begun to claim the village's living.

Some of them dashed over the piles of rubble, duffel and plastic supermarket bags stuffed with clothes bouncing at their sides, as if they were afraid a bomb might fall before they could escape. Others seemed paralyzed, uncertain of where to go.

Red Cross ambulances reached the edge of the debris, but much of the town could only be navigated on foot. Many of the people stuck here were too feeble and sick to make the walk out. Journalists ended up hoisting them onto their backs and carrying them to the ambulances. One elderly woman was stretched out on a ladder and hauled out.

Unexploded missiles glinted in the sun. Deep bomb craters yawned from the ground. Walls had been demolished until there was almost no shade — only the enormous sky, a pitiless sun and silence.

A wrinkled woman named Sita Hamayed had propped herself up against a shuttered shop, wild-eyed. Her fingers were coated with clay dust, as if she had been digging.

"We were under the rubble," she said, as the groaning sound of an Israeli drone filled the village.

"When I hear that plane it scares me," she said. "God help me. Let them come and take me away."

At her side, her brother — a mentally handicapped man with gray hair — sat cross-legged on the ground, giggling and weeping, his tongue lolling from his mouth.

"Are they going to hit us again today?" she asked.

An old man sat on the hood of an abandoned car that rose from the sea of rubble. His feet dangled, bare and swollen, from beneath his pajama cuffs.

"Our house fell on top of us," his sister, Roda Bazzi, said dazedly. She squinted from beneath her head scarf, as if she were trying to remember something. She babbled, then fell into silence.

"It's been days without food or water," she said in a slow tone that was both apologetic and amazed. "I'm talking and I don't know what I'm saying. I can't even walk."

The only hospital here is swathed in darkness; fuel for the generators ran out over the weekend. The staff has dwindled from 90, including 40 doctors, to five. The only doctor who remained shoved a gurney coated with dust into the lobby, where a thin wash of daylight illuminated a single bottle of iodine.

Nobody bothered to scrub the bloodstains off the floor and counter. Nothing looked — or smelled — sterilized. An Israeli bomb had crashed through the roof of the doctors' sleeping quarters; twisted beams filtered a shaft of sunlight.

"The other day we were sitting here counting the shells," said the doctor, Fouad Taha. His green eyes look exhausted; he had been wearing the same pair of pants for a week. "In half an hour, we counted 350 bombs."

Taha has stuck it out here, even though he admitted he could do little more than administer first aid and hope a Red Cross ambulance would come. But on Monday, he said he'd had enough. He'll evacuate Bint Jbeil today, he said. His family is already in Beirut.

"Without a hospital there is no hope for all these people," he said. "But there's not much you can do anymore."

Refugees were still rushing out of Bint Jbeil, many of them elderly and on foot. They ate fruit and vegetables they found in fields along the way and begged passing cars to take them to the hospital.

Remaining in the ruins was a Hezbollah fighter, who lingered beside the town reservoir. Like most foot soldiers in the Shiite Muslim militia, the 43-year-old schoolteacher refused to give his name. The scratch of a walkie-talkie came from his pants pocket.

"The whole world is crying for Israel to stop, and they don't care," he said, turning to point over the hills toward the Israeli border. "Why do I fight? It's an emergency. You think I like it? I hate it. All the time fighting, fighting, fighting."

Clad in a plaid shirt and a baseball cap advertising a tire shop, the Hezbollah fighter said that his house had been destroyed for the second time — the first time, he said, was in 1983.

"The only thing that matters is after the war is over we gather money and buy rockets and buy missiles and buy guns," he said. "Because nobody in this earth loves us. I can't believe it. Just because we are Muslims."

His friend, a fellow Hezbollah fighter, had been "martyred" in the battles, he said. He began to cry as he spoke.

"I wish I were in his place and martyred instead of living this dog's life," he said.

"People think we like to fight. They don't think we want to live with our children and raise them," he said. "Tomorrow they will come and give us a few dollars and say, 'OK, let's forget everything, let it pass.' But I've lost friends. I've lost family. You cry for people you lost. You cry for the town. You cry for history."


2. Families struggle to stay together while fleeing violence in Lebanon
By Hannah Allam (from McClatchy Newspapers)

TYRE, Lebanon - When Israeli airstrikes tore through the lemon orchards and potato patches of Mansouri, a village near Lebanon's border with Israel, the Mdayhli family disappeared.

Manal Mdayhli, her husband and their infant daughter took cover with strangers in a neighboring village, where relief workers discovered them days later, hungry and with no word of their relatives.

On Saturday, news trickled in. One cousin had been evacuated to Germany. An aunt was camping at a school in Beirut. Another cousin, Darwish Mdayhli, had become body No. 97 in a mass grave in the southern port city of Tyre.

The whereabouts of many others are still unknown, uprooted, like tens of thousands of other Lebanese villagers, from places where their families have lived for generations. The resulting demographic shift will take months, probably years, to sort out.

In their rush to escape Israel's offensive against Hezbollah, displaced families have ended up with strangers, in schools, in parks, in rows of unmarked graves. Shiite Muslim families have sought shelter among Christians. Lebanese families have gained sanctuary in Palestinian refugee camps.

They struggle to stay together. And they go anywhere but home.

"There is a kind of glory that comes when you are buried in your own soil," said Manal Mdayhli, her veil pulled across her mouth to mask the stench as workers dumped rotting bodies into plywood coffins at a mass burial in Tyre on Saturday. "I don't know that any of us will get that honor now."

Every hour, more families join the lethal game of hopscotch as they flee their homes in search of cover from Israeli airstrikes. With each jump, the lucky ones inch farther away from the bloodshed: from Bint Jbail on the border to Rmeish a mile north to Tyre further up the coast, then to Sidon, and finally to Beirut.

That was Zahra Baydoun's escape route, and it took her family 17 days to make it. In peacetime, they drove it in four hours. Baydoun's Shiite Muslim family, unabashed supporters of Hezbollah, spent most of their journey under siege in Rmeish, a predominantly Christian village.

As her hosts prayed in front of portraits of Jesus, Baydoun intoned verses from the Quran. There was electricity for one hour a night, so the women of the families hurriedly cooked dinners with dwindling ingredients and no bread. Baydoun, 26, shared stories about her old life just outside of Bint Jbail, where she worked as a math teacher. She told her hosts she wished Hezbollah allowed women fighters, and delighted when she heard the Christian family praise "the resistance."

For two weeks, friendships blossomed as bombs crashed down around them. Then Friday, a Red Cross convoy rescued them from Rmeish. The Shiites and the Christians parted, probably never to meet again.

"We all shared the same water as the animals and I swear it was greener than this grass," Baydoun said, sitting on the lawn of a hotel in Tyre as her weary family waited for a ride to Beirut. "We stayed together, made it out together. I miss them already."

Many families lost members along the trail north. Refugees recounted story after story of shrapnel hitting their cars. Passing drivers scooped up the survivors; dead relatives were left behind.

When they finally arrived at relief centers with working televisions, they sat glued to Lebanese channels that broadcast a crawl of text messages from those who were separated from their families. "To Fatima from Bint Jbail, we are waiting for you," one message read.

In the Darwinian scramble to safety, the old or sick often didn't make it. Saturday's mass burial included an 80-year-old woman discovered in her garden and a 90-year-old neighbor pulled from the debris of her home at least eight days after she had died. With no trace of their families, they were lowered into the earth, attended by foreign news photographers and a cleric who'd never met them.

"My heart is crying, but I keep the tears inside so the people don't see it," said the Shiite cleric, Akil Zeineddine. "We may have different religions, but we have the same roots and the same blood. Even if they are buried far away from their homes, they are still in Lebanon."

The quest for a safe haven is often so hasty that it's not just homes the families leave behind. As other relief workers organized the mass interment, Ali Naim, a Lebanese doctor, planned a separate burial. With a freezer full of arms and legs with no owners, Naim said, he had to create a separate graveyard for pieces of people who are believed to be alive.

"These limbs don't match the bodies we have, so we can only hope their owners are still out there somewhere," he said. "This is not their hometown, this is not even whole people, but what else can we do?"

Kamal Atris, a 45-year-old tobacco farmer, his wife, Randa, 40, and their four children were fleeing the village of Chahine when an Israeli strike took out the back end of their car. They all survived, all injured.

With shattered bones and nasty burns, the Atris family was turned away from an overcrowded hospital because their wounds weren't life threatening. A passer-by overheard their plight and immediately offered them floor space at his home in a rundown Palestinian camp in Tyre. Two of their sons hitched rides farther north to Sidon; the rest of the family hasn't heard from them.

Randa, the mother, has a back injury that prevents her from sitting or standing, so she is confined to a bed in a dark, borrowed room. Her 18-year-old daughter Zeinab has a head wound; her 14-year-old son Nimr has a broken arm and charred flesh. But with a pile of threadbare mattresses and plates of rice from the Palestinians, they consider themselves among the most fortunate of their village.

"I'll go back to my home one day," Atris said, with little conviction. "But for now, God sent somebody to help us."


3. Letter from Tel Aviv
The view from the bubble
By Shari Motro

THE COVER OF LAST WEEK'S Time Out Tel Aviv was a local variation on Saul Steinberg's famous New Yorker cover ``View of the World from 9th Avenue." Allenby Street is in the foreground, followed by Rothschild Boulevard, Shenkin Street, Kadishman's three-dot sculpture, the Yarkon River, and beyond it, all crammed in together: Baghdad, Tehran, Haifa, Tiberias, Acre, Beirut, a battleship, jet planes, missiles, explosions.

This is where I am for the summer, in the heart of what people here call ``the Tel Aviv bubble." Tel Avivians, like New Yorkers, think the world revolves around them. They party and they network and they make money and they support the arts. They're proud of their lefty credentials (against the occupation, for gay rights, for saving the environment) and of their gallows humor, and they look down on the religious in Jerusalem and the nerds in Haifa.

I'm here, and I'm ashamed, because there's a war going on and I'm having a nice time. I spend my days doing research and writing. In the evenings I do yoga and eat out with friends and family.

When I left Israel at 18, I told myself I'd never come back. Israel was oppressive, both personally and politically; I wanted nothing to do with it. I spent years freezing on the East Coast of the US trying to forget it, trying to pretend it wasn't at the core of who I am. Then sometime around my 30th birthday I gave in. I realized that loving it and hating it is OK.

So now I come back twice a year, and the truth is that this summer is not all that different from my last visit, over Christmas break. The bubble's cafes are full, regardless of the horrors in the north, or in the south, or just an hour's drive east in the West Bank.

Meanwhile, my inbox is flooded with worried messages from friends and colleagues in the States. ``I am sure you and your family might feel differently, but we would not mind one little bit if you came back early," writes one of my colleagues at the University of Richmond, and I don't know how to begin to explain that I don't feel scared at all. I feel relieved to be here. The war seems so much farther away here than it would if I were watching it from Richmond-farther from me, farther from my family, farther from reality. Watching it from the outside would have made me crazy, the way I was in New York during the Second Intifada.

Rockets are falling on Haifa. Haifa! Just 45 minutes by train from the Tel Aviv suburb I grew up in, where my parents and sister still live. Family snapshots of the dead fill the pages of the paper. Hezbollah's leader, Hassan Nasrallah, keeps warning of more ``surprises," and the experts agree that Hezbollah is capable of hitting much deeper into the country. Why do I feel immune?

My inbox also contains a forward of a forward of a forward. ``Israeli atrocities," the subject line reads. The message includes photos of the corpses of Lebanese children, their skin charred, their clothing ripped off by a blast.

The pictures anger my Israeli friends. We have our own horrific pictures, they say. We didn't start this. If anyone's to blame it's Hezbollah and the Lebanese government. This isn't Gaza, this isn't the Palestinians, whom we've squeezed for so long that you can legitimately say, like Ehud Barak did, that if you were in their shoes you might become a terrorist, too. This is different. Hundreds of missiles are being launched from a sovereign state, disabling a quarter of the country. What are we supposed to do?

I don't know what we should do, but I can't get the images out of my head. I feel implicated.

So I go to the antiwar rally, which starts at the square where Yitzhak Rabin was killed after another peace rally I participated in a decade ago. I bump into a guy I sat next to in high school. He has a sweet, open face. He's become a teacher in Jaffa working to integrate the story of the Nakba, the Palestinian narrative of ``the catastrophe" of 1948, into Israeli public school education. This isn't the Israel I see every day, the Israel I left.

The next day I go to the beach. The light is beautiful. The jellyfish have moved north. Their numbers had already dwindled last week, but their venom lingered in the water. Now that they're gone, the sea is filled with bathers again. A pair of helicopters flies south, back from Lebanon I imagine. I feel guilty, guilty about the innocents that are being killed in my name, and at the same time, even if their missions may be wrongheaded, guilty about the pilots who are risking their lives in my name.

Everybody here has déjà vu of a different war-for some it's 1973, for others it's 1982. For me it's 1991. I was a teenager then, and the glee of missing school and the hyper-awareness of being alive in the present were so much more real, so much less abstract than the danger. During the first Scud attack, sitting with my gas mask in our sealed room and listening to the dull rumbles outside, not only was I not scared, I was excited. I'd made a bet with my sister that Saddam would attack that night, and then he did. I won. I remember running to our shelter smiling.

I wasn't scared then, and I'm not scared now. I'm only scared for a split second every couple of days. I hardly even notice it. An ambulance passes and I stop to listen and make sure that it's just one and not many. I walk through the crowded market, a favorite spot for suicide bombers, and I think: This is really stupid, I should get out of here, but I keep shopping anyway, looking for good cherries. Planes wake me up in the middle of the night. I can't distinguish the commercial flights from the F-16s. It's not even a fully formed thought, but something in my body wonders whether the war has reached us, too. And then I fall back asleep.

(Shari Motro is an assistant professor of law at the University of Richmond.)