'God Stop the Bombs!'

Photos
Bombs Shake Hospital Shelter
Nearly 1,500 people seeking shelter from Israeli airstrikes crowd together at Tibnin General Hospital in southern Lebanon. Tibnin, near the Israeli border, endures Israeli bombing without doctors, running water or electricity.

"Have you brought any food?" someone else shouted.

There are no shops open in Tibnin, once a town of 4,000. Families said they were surviving on one meal a day; estimates of the sick ran from 40 to more, mostly children. The hospital administration has largely fled; so have the doctors. Hardly any aid can reach the town on winding, remote roads where Israeli forces have repeatedly struck civilian cars. The hospital's lifeline is the Lebanese Red Cross, which lost two ambulances Sunday night when Israeli rockets pierced their roofs. On most days, sometimes in several trips, the ambulances bring 300 to 500 packets of flat bread, 10 pieces in each, and maybe 100 cans of tuna.

"It's one drop of water in the ocean," said Qassem Shaalan, a Red Cross worker who was wounded in Sunday's attack.

"It's not 1 percent of what they need," he added. "It's one in 1,000."

Wehbe, in soiled clothes, his moustache heavy, arrived at the hospital Tuesday morning, with 50 others from his village of Ainata. They were some of the last still there after bombing had gone on three days, day and night.

"They were destroying the houses over our heads," he said. "Fine, let soldier fight soldier, but we're civilians."

They took their chances, walking six miles through the morning. Shelling punctuated their exodus, along roads littered with the shuttered artifacts of everyday life: the La Ciel salon, Maatouk Café, the Mansour restaurant and the Mehdi schools.

"And they're still coming from all over the place," Wehbe said, pointing to a family that had just arrived from Bint Jbeil, where fighting raged Tuesday between Hezbollah fighters and Israeli troops trying to occupy the town.

He listed the other towns emptying into Tibnin: Aitaroun, Maroun al-Ras and Yaroun. Family after family listed dead and wounded relatives. Time and again, they pleaded for help in getting the bodies excavated from rubble that had entombed them in their villages. The Red Cross has focused on saving the living; other than ragtag civil defense units, there is no government left.

"How can we get in? How can we get their bodies?" asked Awadeh. "God show me."

She had arrived a week ago from Aitaroun, after her brother, Moussa, his wife, Jamila, and their five children -- Ali, Abeer, Hassan, Mariam and Mohammed, ages 5 to 15 -- were killed in an airstrike on their village. They left the corpses behind. She sat with her sister, Haniyeh, who had trekked with her and others from the village about 10 miles.

Haniyeh pointed to her bandaged feet, still swollen and bruised from the walk.