Also see below:     
Evacuations Under Way in Beirut    [

    Dazed Refugees Flood Beirut
    By Megan K. Stack
    The Los Angeles Times

    Wednesday 19 July 2006

Lebanon is facing a vast humanitarian crisis, with the displaced estimated at 500,000.

    Beirut - Nonstop battles between Israel and Hezbollah have wreaked a massive humanitarian crisis in Lebanon, driving as many as 500,000 people from their homes, according to United Nations estimates.

    The frazzled refugees who have flooded Beirut are struggling to find food, water and medicine. They sleep chockablock in city parks, abandoned basements and sweltering schools in the capital.

    Traumatized and disoriented, many of them stagger in from the country's south or Beirut's southern suburbs. They are safer here in the capital, but they are also living without clean drinking water, showers or a change of clothes.

    "Where will we go now?" asked Ibtesam Srour, 36, who had taken shelter in a Beirut school after her home on Beirut's outskirts was flattened in a missile strike.

    Srour's eyes brimmed with tears. Her husband was injured in the attack, as were several other family members.

    "We're not getting medicine," she fretted. "They come and ask what we want, write it down and leave."

    Tens of thousands of Israelis also have fled their homes, to escape Hezbollah rocket attacks, but they have not suffered the food, water and medical shortages facing the Lebanese.

    Lebanon's government has opened the schools of Beirut to the sudden wave of refugees, but many of the shelters are being run by the cadres of Hezbollah, along with a few nongovernmental organizations. Across the city, vignettes of despair play out against a backdrop of playgrounds, blackboards and lunchrooms.

    As the afternoon heat presses down, the sour stench of sweaty skin, soiled diapers and dirty clothes fills the classrooms. Babies wail, children scream, adults snap at one another and weep.

    An old man and his grandchildren arrived at a crammed schoolhouse near central Beirut with injuries suffered in the air raids, but there was no doctor. An old woman fainted; an ambulance was summoned but it never came. There were no ambulances left to come.

    "They came here with the clothes on their backs, and the crisis is deepening every day," said Mazen Ismael, a teacher who volunteered to run one of the shelters on behalf of the family of the late prime minister Rafik Hariri. "The situation has gotten so bad that we're truly afraid of disease."

    The country has fallen so deep into chaos that it's almost impossible to know the extent of the humanitarian troubles. Entire neighborhoods have been drained of their residents.

    The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees on Tuesday released an estimate of 500,000 displaced Lebanese. The agency, which did not explain how it arrived at the figure, also said it was sending as many as 11 more staff members to Lebanon.

    Isolated by its crippled airport, blockaded seaports and bombed roads, Lebanon has seen its food and medical supplies dwindle to dangerously low levels. Officials are struggling to accommodate the massive waves of the displaced and reach people left in warfare-racked areas. They are also keenly aware that even towns that have escaped the bombings will soon run out of basic commodities.

    As the crisis deepened this week, Lebanese officials said Israeli bombs hit the nation's largest milk factories, a major food factory and an eagerly awaited aid convoy that was making its way toward Beirut from the United Arab Emirates.

    "It's a very serious escalation," Social Affairs Minister Nayla Mouawad said. "We were putting a lot of hope on the milk factories, to get milk for children and elderly people."

    An Israeli military spokesman denied targeting the factories and aid trucks. Only Hezbollah facilities and vehicles believed to be transporting weapons were struck, he said.

    The most harrowing reports emerged from the Hezbollah-dominated southern region closest to the Israeli border, where residents have been trapped in bomb shelters and basements for nearly a week while earth-shaking battles raged outside.

    With the network of roads eviscerated by Israeli bombs, villages have run out of food, Lebanese officials said, adding that hunger had begun to set in.

    "We can't meet their daily needs. There's no food, and the logistics are very difficult to send them food," said Freddy Yarak, an advisor to the Social Affairs Ministry. "We're having problems with the malnutrition of babies."

    Most of the refugees are poor and working-class. They have abandoned their homes, lost track of family members and spent days huddled in shelters.

    "I'm very, very tired. I want to sleep but I can't," said Ali Assem, 48, who packed up his six children and drove to Beirut from the southern city of Tyre last week. "They only give us food once a day, and we're hungry."

    One of Assem's daughters uses a wheelchair. She sat alone in a schoolhouse corridor Tuesday, watching children file up and down the staircase.

    "She doesn't cry," her father said, "but she's shocked every time a bomb falls."

    Sometimes firefighters come by the school where the family is staying and refill the water tanks outside. But the water isn't suitable for drinking, and many of the refugees have come down with bacterial infections. There are 15 toilets for 700 people.

    In another shelter, an old man sleeps sitting up against the schoolhouse wall, calloused feet stretched bare before him, fingers working the empty air as if he has prayer beads. At his side stretches another man, fast asleep on his stomach, flies crawling over his skin.

    The men didn't have the soggy slabs of foam used in many of the shelters; they slept on sheets of hard foam, the kind that would be used to pack television sets in the United States. Others slept on the floor, or atop a thin blanket.

    A tour of Beirut's shelters offers a revealing look at the power of Hezbollah. Known for its social and charity network as well as its powerhouse political party and its militia, the Shiite Muslim group has once again eclipsed government efforts: Many of the facilities are being run by Hezbollah. The group says it is collaborating with the government at the shelters, but representatives of the government are generally not present.

    "Because this war is against Hezbollah, this is our legal obligation," said Jihad Akil, 45, a Hezbollah activist who was overseeing a Beirut schoolhouse sheltering hundreds of people. "It's also our religious obligation."

    The government hasn't been able to determine how many people have been displaced, officials said Tuesday. The figure is at least 70,000, probably much higher and rising all the time, estimated Yarak, the social affairs advisor.

    When the United Nations investigated, it found 60,000 people displaced in a single valley in the Chouf mountains, the office for refugees said. Of those, 20,000 were sleeping in public buildings; the rest where staying with friends and family.

    Lebanese are also among the 100,000 people who have fled into Syria.

    Despite good intentions, aid organizations have been floundering in their efforts to deliver help. The bombing has been too heavy, the crisis too sudden, the infrastructure too broken.

    "No Hezbollah, no Red Cross, no government," said Mohammed Ali, 40, a grocer who has stuck it out at home despite the bombings in his suburban Beirut neighborhood. "Nobody has brought us so much as a kilo of water."

    The streets of Ali's neighborhood, which is home to Hezbollah's offices, were deserted Tuesday. A few residents stood on the edge of the road, fidgeting nervously while they scanned the crater-filled streets for a taxi. Most young men who'd been sent on behalf of their families, they clutched plastic bags stuffed with a change of clothes.

    "There was no more house," said Hussein Abu Yehiya, an engineering student who had made his way back to the neighborhood from a shelter at a schoolhouse. "The cupboard was intact, but we had to pull the rubble off of it."

    At the schools, families struggled to make themselves at home. Barefoot boys played soccer in a concrete yard. Girls dangled from monkey bars, their heads swathed in Islamic veils.

    A chaotic weaving of children's voices spilled out into the afternoon through open windows. Women washed clothes in buckets in the schoolyard, hanging them to dry on the bushes.

    Under a flimsy strip of corrugated tin propped up by beams, middle-aged men and women crammed themselves into tiny chairs to smoke cigarettes and trade gossip.

    "This was something we did not expect," said Aniya Salman, 34.

    Salman and her five children spent the first nights of the bombardment sleeping in an alleyway alongside their apartment house in a southern suburb of Beirut; it was the closest thing they had to a bomb shelter.

    "My children were very frightened, saying 'Israel is going to kill us,' " Salman said, her children pressing curiously around her. "There wasn't any power. The strikes and bombs were so strong we couldn't hear anymore."

    Her 11-year-old daughter, Sama, tucked her chin shyly into the neck of her hijab and hugged herself tight. Her face was round, the fabric of her blouse embellished with rhinestone hearts.

    "I thought we were going to die," she said. "It was like thunder, but stronger."

 

---

    Go to Original

    Evacuations Under Way in Beirut
    By Anthony Shadid
    The Washington Post

    Wednesday 19 July 2006

Israel continues deadly airstrikes; Hezbollah fires scores of rockets.

    Beirut - By helicopter and ship, hundreds of Americans and Europeans fled on Tuesday from Beirut, ending its first week of siege, as casualties mounted in deadly Israeli raids that struck a Lebanese military base, a truck carrying food from Syria and a village near the border. The militant group Hezbollah fired at least 100 rockets into Israel, killing one civilian.

    On a sweltering day, Norwegian, Swedish, Greek and British ships pulled into Beirut's harbor, most of them trying to load their passengers before nightfall. From a helipad at the U.S. Embassy overlooking Beirut, the dull thud of rotors announced the arrival of helicopters, which ferried passengers to the island of Cyprus, taking 30 people on each trip. Other U.S. citizens waited, growing more frustrated over having to endure another day of a conflict that has begun to impose a wartime logic in the city.

    "I had to come and cry at the door of the U.S. Embassy, kissing hand and foot, telling them they must let me leave," said Raba Letteri, a child-care provider from Reston, Va., who was on vacation in Lebanon with her husband and two children.

    They were living near Beirut's international airport, a swath of the capital barraged in Israeli airstrikes. Her 2-year-old son, Aaron, had a stomach infection. As they waited to board, he burst into tears. "This is the worst thing in my life," she said.

    Through the day, Beirut itself was relatively quiet. Life returned to some streets so far unscathed by the attacks. Even traffic in the battered Shiite Muslim suburbs, Hezbollah's stronghold, trickled past the rubble of destroyed bridges and the shattered glass from apartment buildings that littered the streets. To some, the day was a brief respite as evacuations got underway. What might follow the foreigners' departure was a question many asked.

    "I feel in my heart that after the foreigners leave, big problems are on the way," said Jamil Abu Hassan, a burly 56-year-old, loitering near the port. "Today, the embassies are taking their people. Tomorrow, the next day? God knows what will happen."

    Hezbollah fired at least 100 rockets at Israel on Tuesday, including a large barrage an hour before sunset, striking about 10 towns and cities across northern Israel, from Haifa on the Mediterranean coast to tourist communities in the southern Galilee region. [Two big explosions reverberated over Beirut early Wednesday, and missiles hit towns to the east and south of the capital, the Associated Press reported.]

    One Israeli was killed Tuesday in a rocket strike in Nahariya about four miles south of Lebanon on the coast, the Israeli military reported. Twenty-one people were injured. So far in the fighting, 25 Israelis have been killed, including 12 soldiers.

    [Israeli armored forces entered the central Gaza Strip overnight and clashed with Palestinian militants, killing two members of Hamas and wounding five, the Associated Press reported, citing residents. Witnesses reported heavy gunfire around the Maghazi Refugee Camp, not far from the Gaza Strip's border with Israel. Fourteen other people, including children, were reported wounded. Five Israeli soldiers were wounded, two of them seriously, the military said, describing the raid as part of its effort to halt rocket fire and recover a soldier captured by gunmen June 25.]

    Several rockets struck Haifa, Israel's third-largest city, about 22 miles south of Lebanon, where eight civilians were killed in a rocket barrage Sunday, the Israeli military said. The city's port remained closed for a second day because of the danger.

    More than 720 Hezbollah rockets - a small portion of the militant Islamic group's arsenal - have struck Israel since hostilities began a week ago, when Hezbollah crossed the border and seized two Israeli soldiers. In the wake of the attack, Israel has unleashed a destructive military offensive that has killed more than 230 Lebanese, most of them civilians. The country's airport is closed, and the south is largely cut off from the rest of the country by wrecked roads and collapsed bridges.

    The Israeli military said its jets flew about 110 raids over Lebanon on Tuesday, part of a campaign that has created competing narratives of the war. An Israeli military spokeswoman said the raids were targeting trucks carrying Hezbollah weapons, Katyusha rocket launchers in southern Lebanon, Hezbollah weapons storage facilities, bridges and roads used to transport weapons and fighters - "all of this to damage the Hezbollah infrastructure," she said.

    [Israeli troops entered southern Lebanon overnight for what a military spokesman called a "pinpoint" operation near the border. Such raids have been conducted previously.]

    In Lebanon, anger grew at the number of civilians killed and the dismantling of infrastructure that many Lebanese saw as their greatest achievement in the post-civil war era.

    "This is a city of ghosts," said Adib Hourani, a 26-year-old gas station attendant, pointing down a deserted street.

    In Aitaroun, a village near the Israeli border, a family of five was killed, although some witness accounts put the toll at nine. On the twisting mountain road to Damascus, an Israeli raid struck a truck carrying sacks of sugar and rice bound for Beirut, as well as two other large trucks, a pair of sedans and a four-wheel-drive taxi. In Kfar Chima, a Lebanese army base took a direct hit as troops rushed to bomb shelters, killing at least 11 Lebanese soldiers and wounding 35, the military said. Black fires stained nearby cinder-block tenements, and charred, twisted fenders, engine blocks and debris were scattered along the highway overlooking the base.

    Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has said that Israel wants the Lebanese army to deploy to the border, now under the effective control of Hezbollah, but on several occasions, Israeli aircraft have targeted Lebanese military installations.

    An Israeli military spokeswoman, Capt. Noa Meir, said the military was checking reports of the strike on the base, reiterating that Israeli forces were "doing everything we can to keep civilians and the Lebanese military out of harm's way."

    Even the most optimistic Lebanese officials have acknowledged that diplomacy to end the conflict remains at its initial stages. British Prime Minister Tony Blair and U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan have suggested that a multinational force deploy to the Lebanese border. Annan said the force would have to be more effective than the current U.N. Interim Force in Lebanon, which was largely ineffective in stopping either Hezbollah or Israel.

    Although some European countries have expressed support, both the United States and Israel have responded coolly, and Israeli officials, after meeting U.N. negotiators Tuesday, said that the campaign will not let up before the soldiers are released and Hezbollah withdraws from the Israeli border. For their part, Hezbollah officials seem to have become convinced that the stakes of the war have become much higher: a U.S.-backed Israeli plan to strategically realign the region.

    To a striking degree, both the Israeli public and Hezbollah's supporters seem prepared for a longer struggle.

    A poll in Tuesday's Yedioth Aharonoth, an Israeli daily, found that 86 percent of those surveyed said that the Israeli offensive against Hezbollah was "the right thing to do," and 81 percent wanted it to continue; 58 percent said it should continue until Hezbollah is destroyed, and 17 percent said they favored a cease-fire and the start of negotiations.

    In Beirut's southern suburbs, where trash has piled up on corners and shops were almost uniformly shuttered, Abbas Fattuni sat with a friend smoking a water pipe in front of his auto parts store. They watched the traffic, enjoying the respite of bombing in the capital.

    "We're nothing without the resistance," he said, as his friend nodded his agreement between puffs. "When a Lebanese dies, anywhere in the country, no one in the Arab world lifts a finger. Only the resistance takes care of them."

    Across Lebanon, the siege began reverberating in people's lives. The price for items such as kerosene and flour have all increased. Residents are withdrawing money from banks and trying to convert their Lebanese pounds into U.S. dollars, fearing a devaluation. The price of gasoline in the southern city of Tyre has increased more than sixfold.

    "Six days, no sleep. We couldn't even buy bread," said Mirna Ballout, a 30-year-old Lebanese American who left Tyre on Monday and was standing outside the U.S. Embassy on Tuesday. "It's not fair - whether it's for Hezbollah or whether it's for Israel. It's just not fair for the people living here."

    Her two sons, Bassam, 7, and Yassine, 4, leaned against a suitcase. A few hours earlier, she comforted them after they thought a car door slamming was a bomb. Her daughter, 9-year-old Dana, held the handle of her pink Hello Kitty suitcase and recounted the days, her eyes wide with fear and surprise. "It's my first time," she said. "That was why I was really scared." She smiled. "I hope this is my last time."

    The helicopters ferried what the embassy called special cases on Tuesday - the sick, elderly and families with young children. Officials said 136 American students studying at the American University of Beirut and the Lebanese American University were evacuated aboard a Norwegian vessel from Beirut's port.

    U.S. officials said they believe they will have the capability to transport as many as 2,400 U.S. citizens out of Lebanon on Wednesday, using two civilian cruise ships and Marine Corps helicopters to ferry people to nearby Cyprus. The boosted evacuation effort could include the removal of more than 5,000 citizens by the end of the week.

    State and Defense department officials said they have been limited to air and sea evacuations because they have deemed the roads leading out of the country into Syria to be too hazardous. The Orient Queen cruise ship, with the ability to carry 800 to 1,000 people, docked in Beirut on Tuesday night and was preparing to leave for Cyprus at dawn Wednesday. A second ship, slated to carry about 1,400 people, was also scheduled to be available Wednesday.

    Vice Adm. Patrick Walsh, commander of the U.S. 5th Fleet, said sailors and Marines from the Iwo Jima Expeditionary Strike Group and the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit had been ordered to the Mediterranean Sea to assist in the large-scale evacuation. Nine U.S. warships were headed to the region to provide security and, if needed, to help transport civilians to safety.

    One of those departing was Adam al-Sarraf, a 20-year-old American from Los Angeles, who was studying Arabic at the American University of Beirut. His Iraqi-born father, working in Baghdad, had called to give him advice: Get off the fifth floor and stay in the basement. Watch out for the windows.

    "The students really sympathize with the people here," Sarraf said, standing on the campus before his departure to the port, where he was to board a Norwegian ship. "We understand they're going through much more than we are."

    --------

    Correspondent John Ward Anderson in Jerusalem, staff writer Josh White in Washington, and staff photographer Michael Robinson-Chavez and special correspondent Alia Ibrahim in Beirut contributed to this report.