Civilian Toll Mounts in Lebanon Conflict

"It's nothing more than revenge, revenge on civilians," Zabit said from his bed.

The hospital was in chaos. Someone with a fire extinguisher tried to put out the flames incinerating Zabit's car as other cars barreled past, fleeing the south. Mahmoud was carried in, cradled in someone's arms. Knots of women sobbed. Then the victims of the minibus arrived from near the town of Kafra. Gurney after gurney entered. One boy's left hand was shredded by shrapnel. A woman sat in a chair, dazed, as others tried to ask her questions. A stretcher smashed into a row of chairs.

"We didn't feel anything. We didn't see anything coming down," said Ali Shaita, a stocky 14-year-old, whose uncle, Mohammed, and grandmother, Nazira, were killed in the attack on the minibus. "It just hit us," said his 12-year-old brother, Abbas.

Ali sat in a bed at Najm Hospital, holding his IV. He was wounded in his chest and left leg. Blood, his and that of his relatives, drenched his red shorts. His brother was hurt in his right leg, head and right arm. His jeans were splotched with more blood. In another room, their mother, Muntaha, sobbed. Her head was wounded, as was her left arm. Her femur was broken in the attack.

"The bandages are too tight on my head," she pleaded to a nurse.

The Shaitas said the car was speeding out of the village at midmorning. The boys' uncle was carrying a white flag with his hand, as was another passenger. Soon after they were hit, a Red Cross ambulance arrived, the crew worried about roads they deemed too risky.

Abbas Bahr, an orthopedic surgeon, had just come out of six hours of surgery, and his face was drawn.

"This is so hard," he said. "I don't know." He repeated the words again.

"And still I don't know what will happen tomorrow."

The day before in Bint Jbeil, two cars carrying seven people were following a Red Cross ambulance when one was wrecked in an Israeli attack, he said. Two wounded women were put in the trunk of the other car. They had died when they arrived at the hospital in Tyre.

The story of pain and fear was the same across the region, whose inhabitants have abandoned it or are in hiding. The Srours were one of the last families left in the village of Mansuri. The Lebanese family had come from Germany on vacation and had been too afraid to leave. As elsewhere in the south, rumors flew among the huddled: that a ship would take them away, that they had safe passage, that they might be evacuated.

The sense of siege deepened Sunday in Tyre, where residents desperate for fish detonated dynamite in the sea to bring them to the surface. In one of the occasional scenes of confusion, an ambulance hit a 21-year-old resident on a motorcycle, injuring him. Most shops remained closed, and for those people remaining, items like baby's milk, gasoline and chicken were disappearing.