Residents of Besieged City Feel 'Just Left Here to Die'

A Lebanese family flees the southern village of Adloun. Israel used radio spots and recorded telephone messages to urge people to leave the region. (By Lefteris Pitarakis -- Associated Press)

The cars they came in, a BMW and Oldsmobile, had no fuel. He had no money left.

"We're like meat at the butcher shop," he said, shaking his hands. "Who can endure this? They are crushing our spirit."

There were a few televisions at the hospital, but virtually everyone relied on radios, always turned on. Rumors swirled: The lull Thursday was a preamble.

"They say they're hitting Hezbollah, but they're hitting the people. They're hitting the children," said Hussein Yaacoub, who fled his border village of Houla on Saturday. He grabbed the shoulder of his 5-year-old son, Mohammed. "Is he Hezbollah?"

"Ask President Bush what's going to happen. Ask Condoleezza Rice. They should tell us what's ahead for us," he said.

In parts of the region, Israeli aircraft have dropped leaflets warning that any trucks traveling south of the Litani River would be suspected of carrying weapons and could be targeted. An Israeli radio station near the border urged Lebanese to flee, and the recorded telephone messages began Wednesday.

The response has been fear and flight. In the distance, off the coast of Tyre, was a cruise liner taking 600 people -- foreigners and U.N. staff members' families -- to the island of Cyprus.

"This city's going to be destroyed," said Sabrine Shabbash, a 19-year-old Swedish national waiting to depart on an orange dinghy for the ship. She stood with her fiance, 27-year-old Ahmed Zeid, her parents and her four brothers and sisters. They carried only enough clothes to fit into a single yellow shopping bag.

"Look," Shabbash said, as a blast threw up a plume of gray smoke across the harbor, the sound of the explosion smothering the call to prayer.

Near the dock, an organizer called out names: "Ali Jaafar." "Afif Wadie." "Dalia Sbatiya."

When the evacuation ended, at around 3 p.m., two U.N. armored personnel carriers blocked the blue gate to the port.

Across the street stood 18-year-old Abbas Muhanna.

"Why is it that the people of the south -- the women and the children -- die? And the foreigners are the only ones who can leave? What about the Lebanese?" Muhanna asked. "Why the foreigners and not us?" His friend Mohammed Aidibi, 20, jumped in. "The Lebanese aren't considered people," he said. "Foreigners are the only ones who have the right to live."

On the road outside the city, three young men loitered in front of a row of shuttered shops. They had no money. Even if they did, they probably couldn't afford the taxi fare to Beirut, which had gone from 2,000 Lebanese pounds ($1.33) to 50,000, sometimes 150,000($99.50).

"If I had enough money, I would have left a long time ago," said Haitham Akkasha, who worked on a banana plantation.

The three chatted about the pall cast over a paralyzed city. And they kept waiting for a car that might give them a ride for free. After two hours, they suspected they wouldn't find one.

"It's going to be like Iraq here," Akkasha said finally, "complete destruction."

His friend, Hamza Mahmoud, smiled, a grin that suggested a hopeless resignation.

"It's going to be worse than Iraq," he said.