Israel attacks civilian targets in Lebanon

It is estimated that already at least 900,000 Lebanese have been displaced from their homes by Israel's ostensible onslaught against Hezbollah militants in their country. More than 400 Lebanese and 42 Israelis have died since Israel launched its "Summer Rains" bombing campaign. Relief agencies continue to struggle to operate effectively in war-torn Lebanon. International relief groups continue their appeal for safe access to southern Lebanon, as tens of thousands of refugees remain stranded there, and countless wounded, with little assistance. Aside from being impeded by the violence, aid agencies are being held back by an ongoing Israeli air and sea blockade. The widespread destruction of infrastructure by Israeli air strikes is also limiting access. Among hundreds of thousands of refugees scattered across city parks, schools and abandoned buildings in Beirut, new and chilling words have been making the rounds. A senior Israeli Air Force official announced on Israeli Army Radio that "Army chief of staff Dan Halutz has given the order to the air force to destroy 10 multi-storey buildings in the Dahaya district [of Beirut] in response to every [Hezbollah] rocket fired on Haifa." The United Nations and its relief agencies remain outraged over the destruction of lives and infrastructure in Lebanon, in what UN Secretary General Kofi Annan calls a grossly disproportionate use of military force. In addition, four unarmed UN observers from Austria, Canada, China and Finland, died after their UN post in the town of Khiam was hit by an Israeli air strike on July 25. The post was hit by a precision-guided missile after six hours of shelling. UN peacekeepers in south Lebanon contacted Israeli troops 10 times before the lethal bomb was dropped, an initial UN report says. "In my view," UN Emergency Relief Coordinator Jan Egeland told reporters, "when one-third of the wounded and killed reportedly are children and women, then this goes far beyond responding to those armed groups [Hezbollah] and what they are doing against the civilian population in Israel." About 55 percent of all casualties at the Beirut Government University Hospital are children of 15 years of age or less, hospital records show. "This is worse than during the Lebanese civil war," said Bilal Masri, assistant director of the hospital. The fatality rate was high, he said, "because the Israelis are using new kinds of bombs which can enter shelters. They are bombing the bomb shelters which are full of refugees." Masri said that he believed so many children were becoming casualties because of the "widespread and indiscriminate nature of the bombings" and because "children are least able to run away when the bombings commence." His hospital, he said, was functioning with only 25 percent staff because "most are now unable to get here because so many roads and bridges are bombed. Those who are here are eating, sleeping and living here 24 hours a day because if they leave they fear they may be unable to return." Officials say at least 64 bridges have been bombed. Other Israeli targets have included the country's largest milk factory, a food factory, two pharmaceutical plants, water treatment centers, power plants, grain silos, a Greek Orthodox Church, hospitals and ambulance convoys. After meeting with members from a UN team who had just returned from the region, US Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice told reporters that the situation in Lebanon was part of the "birth pangs of a new Middle East," and said that Israel should ignore calls for a cease-fire. Not many people in Beirut are able to see it that way. For every family that manages to leave Beirut, dozens more are pitching up in the city that is fast becoming a vast refugee camp. While there is a daily crawl of traffic making for the Syrian border, most have no choice but to head for the cluttered capital to find refuge in schools, boarded-up apartment blocks, empty offices and parks. Many would like to run farther but they do not have the money to get across the border, and Western governments are not allowing Lebanese families to board the flotilla of evacuation ships. So they sit marooned and morose in makeshift camps that are already overflowing. Mariam Mattar, a 50-year-old mother sitting on a mattress in a park in central Beirut along with hundreds of other refugees from southern Beirut said no home there was safe. "We left our house because they are bombing everything in the civilian neighborhoods," she said. "They are killing all our children. What human would ever do this kind of thing?" Much of Beirut is a devastated city; infrastructure in many areas lies in a shambles after the Israeli bombing. "Does our country not have the right to move forward like other democracies," says Nidal Mothman, a 35-year-old taxi driver in downtown Beirut. "We hate the American government for giving the green light for the Israelis to bomb us back to the Stone Age." The village of Tyre was a place of terror and death on July 23 as Israeli helicopters attacked civilian vehicles fleeing Israel's onslaught in south Lebanon. Israeli forces have sought to clear the area of all residents. Just days earlier, leaflets dropped by Israeli planes warned residents to leave the vicinity, effectively making the area a free-fire zone. An Israeli rocket slammed into the center of the Shaito family's van, killing the mother, Muntaha Shaito and her boys, Ali, 13, and Abbas, 12; her brother in-law Mohammad and his two daughters, Heba, 14, and Kawther, 17; and several other relatives. "They said leave, and that's what we did," said Musbah Shaito as his niece, Heba, 16, cried hysterically behind him for her dead father, whose head was nearly blown off. "This is what we got for listening to them," Shaito said, speaking of the Israelis. The Shaitos had waved a white flag from the van, signifying to Israeli aircraft that they were non-threatening, Shaito said. Minutes before Red Cross ambulances carted away the Shaito family, the Suroor family barreled down the road headed toward Tyre, with the Zabad family right behind. When the Zabads spotted a wounded man on the road, they stopped and picked him up in their Nissan sport utility vehicle. They stopped again to pick up two men who had been attacked on a motorcycle and got even farther behind the Suroors. Suddenly a missile hit the Suroors' Mercedes sedan, killing Mohammad Suroor, the father, and Darwhish Mdaihli, a relative, and severely burning Mohammad's son, Mahmoud, 8, and wounding his two brothers and sister. As soon as the Zabads saw the car hit, they sped past, hoping to get to the Najm Hospital, less than a mile away. But a minute later a missile struck near them, setting the car on fire and the family jumped out. The UN's children agency, UNICEF, has warned that children are bearing the brunt of the crisis. They account for nearly a third of those killed and for nearly half of the displaced, said spokeswoman Wilvina Belmonte. "Most of the casualties are women and children," said Qasim Shaala, the chief medic at Tyre's Red Cross offices. "They [Israel] are not letting us save them. Ambulances aren't allowed into areas after they are shelled." Officials at the Tyre Government Hospital said they counted the bodies of 50 children among the 115 in the refrigerated truck in the morgue. Ahmed Mrouweh, the director of Tyre's Jabal Amel Hospital, flipped through the handwritten ledger on his desk listing the 228 wounded his hospital has treated since the bombing began. "Look at this," he said, running down the list. "One 11-years-old, one five-years-old, one four-year-old." He stopped, just briefly. "This is a three-month-old. We have not received one injured, not one dead, who's not a civilian." "No one is in Hezbollah, I assure you," he said. "All of them are civilians. Hezbollah soldiers are not being sent to the hospital. We don't see them.... The Israelis are just killing civilian people." Doctors and emergency services working in south Lebanon say it is extremely difficult to get access to the wounded because Israel has fired on Red Cross vehicles and civilian traffic. Maha Mrouweh, a financial administrator at the Jabal Amal hospital said: "They are targeting the civilian cars. They are preventing the food from arriving in the south. They are preventing the Red Cross from arriving to the destroyed buildings. They are shooting the Red Cross." "There are bodies still lying in cars," Ahmad Mrouweh said. "It's a disaster. Nobody can reach the hospital because all the roads are cut." "We are being bombed as we try to get to the victims, and when we try to bring them back," said Shaala. Several of his drivers had been wounded by Israeli air strikes and one of his five ambulances was rendered useless. "One of my drivers is in the hospital, with shrapnel wounds to his head, hands and feet," he said. Ahmad Ghanen, one of Shaala's team, described coming under Israeli fire as they tried to retrieve the bodies of a baby and her mother along with two others who were killed in an air strike on their car. "The Israelis have refused to give guarantees that vehicles carrying supplies and wounded will not be targeted," said Peter Bouckaert, emergencies director at Human Rights Watch. "I have worked in Iraq, Afghanistan and Kosovo and I have never seen a situation where humanitarian organizations have faced such access risks." Food prices have increased by almost 400 percent in Beirut and 50 percent in other urban areas as delivery of food becomes impossible. Fuel and emergency stockpiles of medicine are running low across the country. Officials believe that fuel will run out in the next two weeks, medicine in the next three weeks and flour and wheat by September. On July 23, Israel rejected an ambitious plan sponsored by the UN to move thousands of tons of aid. Amer Daoudi, leader of the UN's World Food Program assessment team in Beirut, said: "The damage to roads and bridges has completely disrupted the food supply chain, which is hurting the displaced families." Among those waiting on the dockside for the first trickle of aid to arrive was General Yahyeh Raad, the head of Lebanon's Relief High Commission. "I don't think the world has realized we need a lot of help and we need it now," he said. "We have bought what we could on the local market up to now, but supplies are running short." Further south, Abdul-Rahman al-Bizri, the mayor of Sidon, said nothing had reached the city. "We have had no supplies–not from the rest of Lebanon, nor from other nations," he said. "We are on our own." Some 35,000 refugees have swamped Sidon. The refugees were stretching supplies of fuel, food and medicines that already were tight for Sidon's own population of 100,000. Tens of thousands of people are trying to flee across the border to Syria. The exodus is putting a serious strain on Syria, which has 300,000 Palestinian refugees and over 450,000 Iraqis who fled Iraq after the US-led invasion in 2003. Hassan Hamdan, a 60-year-old man who left southern Lebanon on July 19, described a scene of total devastation. "The Israelis are bombing everything; buildings, civilian homes, the water, electricity, all is destroyed now," he said. "Even the Red Cross there was bombed by these murderers. Then they bombed near the UN building, near my destroyed home." Hamdan said the Israeli attacks were not killing any of the Hezbollah resistance fighters, but were focused on the civilian infrastructure. "They shredded our city," he said. "They thought this would turn us against Hezbollah, but now everyone is with Hezbollah. How could they be otherwise?" At a center set up by the Syrian Personal Relations Association, a non-governmental organization, refugee Walid al-Hammad described scenes of utter destruction caused by Israeli bombings. "They have cut the roads to pieces and are bombing everywhere," he said. "We left yesterday, with our six kids and our neighbors–we ran for our lives. Nothing is left of where we lived. Our city is demolished, yet they aren't killing any resistance fighters." Affaf, a 21-year-old mother holding her one-month-old baby, fled Baalbek City in the Beka Valley of Lebanon. "Baalbek is destroyed and they cut our water and electricity," she said. "They are bombing only civilians, so now most Lebanese are with Hezbollah." Lebanese Prime Minister Fuad Siniora said that his country has been torn to shreds. "Can the international community stand by while such callous retribution by the state of Israel is inflicted on us?" The attacks are set to continue.