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Footsore refugees still unsafe

Suzanne Goldenberg

In their villages lay ancestral houses crushed by Israeli bombs

Tibnin (Lebanon): It is their feet that tell their story. They are bloody, swollen and bandaged after carrying them over mountains and under rocket barrages as Israel's war against Hizbollah erased the lives behind them.

In their villages lay ancestral houses crushed by bombs, family heirlooms abandoned mid-flight, the elderly and the frail, and of course the dead, their bodies trapped beneath the rubble. All that belonged to the past now.

The awful present was here in Tibnin General Hospital, a modest facility even in ordinary times, whose doors on Tuesday opened on a vision of hell: as many as 1,600 desperate and terrified refugees caught up in Lebanon's deepening humanitarian crisis.

They were men, women, children and newborn babies, forced to abandon their homes as the frontline drew nearer, and stranded in this hospital for days. There was no running water or electricity, no doctors or medicines, little food and even less hope.

Shellshcoked

They had walked here over hills shuddering beneath Israeli air strikes. Some were barefoot. Others were shellshocked. Some barely managed to enter this world; five babies have been born prematurely at the hospital since the beginning of the war, the Lebanese Red Cross said.

The hundreds here are the most wretched of this war: too poor or unwilling to flee when the first waves of refugees washed up from south Lebanon. The only destination open for them was the darkness of this hospital cellar, barely relieved by a few flickering candles.

And they still aren't safe. Tibnin lies 7 km from the town of Bent Jbail, a Hizbollah redoubt a couple of kilometres north of the border that is now encircled by Israeli troops. Minutes after our arrival, two artillery shells slammed into the hillside below the hospital. A woman screamed: ``Save us.'' A man yelled at the crowd to calm down, and then a surge of human flesh carried both of them inside. Another shell landed, and then two more.

The roads leading to Tibnin are scored with craters from Israeli strikes, and in several villages at least one house has been flattened by an Israeli bomb, carrying a tonnage capable of blowing out the shutters of shops several hundred metres away. — © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006

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