Tragedy within Tragedy

Like many foreign journalists in Lebanon, I decided on Monday to take advantage of the halt to aerial strikes in south which Israel announced on Sunday to travel and see the damage first hand.

The drive down from Beirut would have weeks ago taken only an hour or two but took us more than five on Monday as we were forced through narrow mountain roads and dirt roads across farms. The roads were full of cars, busses and trucks full to the brim with displaced people. These vehicles were often sporting white flags to avoid being struck from the air (as has already happened to dozens of refugees fleeing their homes on Israeli orders). These are the only roads that open for aid to be distributed to those trapped in the south and for the wounded moved to medical attention.

Our destination was Qana, where an Israeli air-strike has killed roughly sixty people in a tragic repetition of an almost identical attack which left over a hundred dead during the grapes of wrath campaign in 1996. 53 bodies have so far been extracted from the rubble over half of them children, many of the adults either old or infirm. Seven people remain unaccounted for, but every now and then, when the wind changes, you could smell their bodies baking beneath the slabs of concrete in the summer heat. There are no reports of any armed men or weapons being found amongst the dead.

I spoke to Qudai Chalhoub, a resident of the town who told me that all those killed in the most recent attack on Qana were from either his extended family or the Hasham family who also occupied the hilltop village. He has lost in this one massacre most of his extended family. Three of the seven still unaccounted for (and in all probability rotting under the rubble meters from where we stood) were children from his family. He does not speculate about their well being. He tells me of a family of eight, his cousins, who were wiped out with the exception of one young woman. Being one of the wealthiest members of his family, as demonstrated by his fashionable attire and his diamond studded Nokia, he had been doing his best to move his relatives to safety in the north but could only arrange spaces for so many each day.

Dr Jawad Najem of the Director of the Najem hospital near Qana would later inform me that the majority had died from asphyxiation, having been trapped in the rubble for nearly eight hours. "If they could have been reached sooner we could have saved many more lives". He described also the on going struggle of his hospital, the second largest of the four hospitals in the area with its 80 beds and 30 staff, to deal with the influx of wounded. They have been relying on the Red Cross and on civilian cars to bring them their supplies down from Beirut. His family, who owns the hospital, has been buying these from their own pocket hoping to one day be reimbursed by the ministry of health. The wounded that are transferred from here to the government hospital in Beirut are transported almost entirely by their own families as they flee to the north. His policy is to try and keep 25 to 30 beds free as more wounded could arrive at any time.

Dr Najam also described to me, as had Dr Marina El Hajj, the deputy director of the American University hospital, in Beirut the presence of "strange burns" which both suspected of being the result of phosphorus bombs. Such burns as well as people dying from suffocation caused by spasms of the larynx, another symptom consistent with the use phosphorus and reported to me by Dr Najam, have been reported at hospitals and clinics across the country. The use of such weapons, a modern and more powerful version of napalm, is illegal under international law.

Dr Salaam Ismael from Doctors for Iraq has recently arrived in the country in the hope of setting up field clinics in the south as he feels his experience working in places like Fallujah would be helpful. He described the situation in the south and the situation he had seen in Iraq as "almost the same". Once we passed Tyre and entered the south proper on our approach to Qana we saw for our own eyes what he meant. We could not drive more than a kilometer or two without passing the site of a recent Israeli bombing. Craters and destroyed buildings, most of them appearing to have been houses. As in Qana there were smashed children's toys and clothing mingled with the rubble. A reminder that the tragedy at Qana represents only a fragment of a much broader tragedy unfolding in Lebanon which has claimed hundreds of lives already and will claim a thousand soon if not checked.