DAY 7, Time magazine, The ancient city of Tyre, sitting on a promontory built by Alexander the Great, is famed worldwide for its wealth of archeological treasures. Yet in the past week, Tyre, one-time home of the entrepreneurial Phoenician seafaring race, has become a casualty of the dark side of history, a place of fear, destruction and death caught up in the age-old hatreds of the Middle East.
A humanitarian disaster appears to be unfolding among the hills and valleys of south Lebanon, where for five days Israel has hammered home a devastating onslaught against Lebanon’s Hizballah guerrillas, a campaign that Israel says must end with the crushing of the Shi’ite group’s military capabilities.
"This is terror. There are no red lines. They are shooting at ambulances on the road preventing them from coming here," says a distraught Mona Mrowe, an administrator at the Jabel Amel hospital in Tyre, her voice sounding shrill with tension and anger. "I have felt death very close. Yesterday was really …." Her voice trails off into silence.
On Sunday the war came to Tyre; most of the city’s population, upon hearing the news that Hizballah rockets had struck the Israeli port city of Haifa, 18 miles south of the border, sought refuge in the basements of apartment blocks. "It was terrifying," says Mohammed Awayni, 23. "We spent all day in the basement. We could hear the explosions shaking the buildings."
The air raids struck targets on the edges of the city around the Palestinian refugee camps of Bourj Shemali and Al-Bass. But one missile plowed into a 12-story apartment block housing the offices of the Lebanese civil defense, killing 20 people. Monday night, the city reverberated to the boom of air strikes every few minutes while Israeli helicopter gunships clattered off the coast and reconnaissance drones whined overhead.
South Lebanon is no stranger to bloodshed and violence. The last time Israel launched a punishing offensive against its Hizballah enemies was in April 1996 with Operation Grapes of Wrath. In that two-week campaign of air strikes, some 170 Lebanese civilians were killed. But that grim figure was reached after only five days of Operation Just Desserts, and the evidence of the destruction wrought on this hilly region of citrus orchards, tobacco fields and olive groves can be found in the teeming corridors of the Jabel Amel hospital.
"This is much worse than 1996," says Doctor Ahmad Mrowe, the director of the hospital. "Back then we were receiving old people and resistance fighters. This time it’s almost all women and children. We haven’t seen one resistance man," he adds, referring to Hizballah guerrillas. He said that the hospital has received 196 casualties, including 25 dead. "We don’t need democracy," he says. "We just want to live." The basement of the hospital is packed with casualties and their anxious relatives who have fled their homes from neighboring villages to sleep on thin mattresses in the corridors.
United Nations peacekeepers (known by their acronym of UNIFIL) deployed along Lebanon’s border with Israel describe the area as an Israeli free-fire zone, with any vehicle traveling along the roads at risk. On Friday, 16 residents of the tiny border hamlet of Marwahine, 12 miles from the coast, were killed when an Israeli helicopter rocketed their convoy, destroying two vehicles as they fled for the relative safety of Tyre. The next day, a UNIFIL relief column which was attempting to rescue beleaguered residents of Marwahine and nearby villages came under Israeli shellfire, with 12 155mm rounds exploding nearby. A peacekeeper who was on the convoy tells TIME that body-armored U.N. soldiers threw themselves on top of the villagers to protect them from flying shrapnel. On Monday, 20 residents of Aitaroun near the border were reported killed in two seperate strikes on their homes.
The intensity of the conflict has prevented UNIFIL from dispatching more humanitarian convoys, although Milos Strugar, UNIFIL’s senior advisor, says that they intend to send them out anyway."We are doing the best we can under the circumstances," he tells TIME.
Much of the destruction has occurred out of sight of the international media. Before last week, it took little less than an hour to reach Tyre from Beirut, a speedy cruise down the coastal highway past the banana plantations and orange groves that fill the narrow littoral wedged between the Mediterranean sea and the Lebanese mountains. Not any more. After Israel’s onslaught against Lebanon began last Wednesday, the southern portion of the country was quickly sealed off after all the bridges crossing the Litani river, which runs across much of southern Lebanon, were destroyed and roads cratered, making them impassable.
What was happening behind that impenetrable cordon of destruction reached Beirut mainly as rumors. Even reaching the area just north of the Litani was fraught with hazard. Leaflets dropped on Beirut by Israeli aircraft on Monday morning warned Lebanese to avoid traveling along the roads north of Sidon, the seaport midway between Beirut and Tyre. That necessitated an arduous and time-consuming detour high up in the cloud-smothered Chouf mountains, complicated Monday by the choking line of northbound vehicles carrying tens of thousands of refugees fleeing the violence further south.
But by the time the winding road descends into the chalky hills around the southern Lebanese market town of Nabatieh, the roads have cleared of all vehicles. Indeed, the ramshackle villages with their litter-strewn streets appear deserted. Occasionally one or two people are seen, sitting in plastic chairs on the side of the road, chatting and smoking cigarettes. The shops, however are all closed. And high above is the incessant, threatening rumble of Israeli jets and the irritating whine of reconnaissance drones.
An unnerving drive along a narrow road that bends and dips into the Litani valley eventually leads to a dusty causeway, constructed within the previous 24 hours, which crosses the river. It is a single lifeline connecting south Lebanon to the rest of the world, a fragile means of escape for despairing and frightened southerners — and an entry point for reporters eager to see firsthand this most recent outbreak of ancient history.
Israelis say offensive could last weeks
BEIRUT, Lebanon (AP – SAM GHATTAS) struck a Lebanese army base outside Beirut and flattened a house near the border, killing at least 16 people in a new wave of bombings, while Hezbollah fired more rockets at northern Israel, killing one Israeli and wounding several others. Meanwhile, Israeli military officials said the offensive could last several more weeks.
The offensive also could include Israeli ground forces. The developments cast doubt on whether diplomatic efforts could produce a cease-fire anytime soon in the week-old crisis.
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told a visiting U.N. delegation that "Israel will continue to combat Hezbollah and will continue to strike targets of the group" until captured soldiers are released and Israeli citizens are safe from attacks.
Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni said diplomatic efforts were under way, but that a cease-fire would be impossible unless Israel’s three captured soldiers were returned unharmed and Lebanese troops were deployed along the countries’ border with a guarantee that the Hezbollah militia would be disarmed.
Livni’s remarks, which came after she met with a U.N. delegation touring the region, were the first indication that both sides in the weeklong conflict were making significant efforts to end Israel’s bombardment of Lebanon and Hezbollah’s rocket attacks on Israel, which have killed at least 220 people in Lebanon and 24 in Israel.
But Maj. Gen. Udi Adam, the head of the Israeli army’s northern command, said the offensive against Hezbollah, which has mostly been limited to Israel’s air force and navy, would continue.
"I think that we should assume that it will take a few more weeks," he told Israel’s Army Radio.
The army’s deputy chief of staff, Maj. Gen. Moshe Kaplinski, also told Israel Radio that Israel has not ruled out deploying "massive ground forces into Lebanon." cruise ship, the Orient Queen, was due to begin evacuating some of the 25,000 Americans in Lebanon on Tuesday, and the Pentagon said a U.S. Naval destroyer was available to escort it. U.S. military helicopters have already ferried about a score of U.S. citizens to a British base on the nearby Mediterranean island of Cyprus. More helicopter transfers were planned, a U.S. official said.
The base in the southern area of Kfar Chima took a direct hit as the soldiers rushed to their bomb shelters, leaving at least 11 soldiers dead and 35 wounded, the Lebanese military said.
The Lebanese army has largely stayed out of the fighting, but its positions have been repeatedly attacked by Israeli warplanes, undermining Israel’s call for it to help push back Hezbollah from the border.
At least five people also were killed when a bomb hit a house in the village of Aitaroun, near the border with Israel, witnesses said. Israeli warplanes also fired four missiles on the eastern city of Baalbek, wounding four, and southern Beirut — both Hezbollah strongholds, according to witnesses and news reports. Another attack targeted the southern town of Qana, Lebanese TV reported.
Hezbollah’s latest barrage of rockets fired at northern Israel killed one person in the town of Nahariya, Israeli officials said. Rockets also hit the northern city of Haifa.
Eli Dayari, a witness interviewed by Israel’s Channel 10 television, said the rocket hit a two-story building and an apartment there was on fire.
"I was near the bomb shelter, there was a humongous boom, and I saw it was two meters next to my house, really two meters," he said. "People are panicking and the house was on fire, really big flames, the fire fighters are here."
Tuesday’s deaths raised the toll from seven days of fighting to at least 227 people killed in Lebanon and 25 in Israel.
Israel was allowing evacuation ships through its blockade of the country. France and Italy moved hundreds of nationals and other Europeans out Monday on a Greek cruise liner. An Italian ship left earlier with 350 people and other governments were organizing pullouts by land to
India also has evacuated 49 of its citizens from embattled Beirut and stationed four naval vessels off the Lebanese coast to assist in future evacuations, officials said Tuesday.
An Israeli Cabinet minister, Avi Dichter, meanwhile, said Tuesday that Israel may consider a prisoner swap with Lebanon to win the release of two soldiers captured by Hezbollah, but only after its military operation is complete.
"If one of the ways to bring home the soldiers will be negotiations on the possibility of releasing Lebanese prisoners I think the day will come when we will also have to consider this," the public security minister told Israel’s Army Radio.
Meanwhile, Hezbollah fired more missiles at Israel on Tuesday, hitting the city of Haifa and several other locations in northern Israel but causing no injuries. Hezbollah has fired hundreds of rockets at northern Israeli towns from the Lebanese border since fighting began on July 12, forcing hundreds of thousands of Israelis to take cover in underground shelters or flee to the south.
Despite those attacks, Israelis strongly support the military operation against Hezbollah, a poll found. Published in the Israeli daily Yediot Ahronot, it said 86 percent of Israelis believe the operation is justified, 81 percent want it to continue and 58 percent say it should last until Hezbollah is destroyed. The poll had a margin of error of 4.2 percent.
Nevertheless, Livni said, "We are beginning a diplomatic process alongside the military operation that will continue."
"The diplomatic process is not meant to shorten the window of time of the army’s operation, but rather is meant to be an extension of it and to prevent a need for future military operations," she told reporters.
Israel’s offensive to date has been carried out mostly by air and sea. Israel has been reluctant to use ground forces because of memories of its ill-fated 18-year occupation of south Lebanon that ended in 2000.
On Tuesday, Foreign Minister Livni signaled Israel might be willing to accept a temporary international "stabilization" force in south Lebanon to bolster the 2,000-strong force already there. Western nations have been proposing the beefed-up force as part of a possible cease-fire agreement — an idea Israel had previously brushed off.
