'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.

"It's more wretched here than there," she said glumly, sitting on a mattress against the wall.

"We just don't know what's going on," her sister said.

The hospital is a two-story building of concrete, part of it unfinished. The rooms have a sickly glow, barely lit by the sun. The fortunate have occupied rooms; others sleep on mattresses in the hallways, their few belongings stuffed in plastic bags. Weak children sit silent with their mothers. Tempers have frayed, the combustible emotions created by too many people in too little space. They grew worse Tuesday as the shells landed near the fort. An hour before, blasts had ignited fires on the hillside below.

More found room in the darkened basement, where a few candles cast ghostly silhouettes of the displaced against the wall.

"Every day, the numbers keep rising," said Fatimeh Assem, a 13-year-old wandering the halls.

A ride out of Tibnin costs $100, far more than most of the families here have. Even with the money, drivers are reluctant to take roads punctuated with buildings flattened by blasts and cars either incinerated or abandoned, some still flying white flags. At times, rubble spills into the roads. Tracks are cleared by vehicles passing under the iconography of Hezbollah, which draws on the southern Lebanese for much of its support. "The resistance will remain, remain, remain," one sign read. At several spots along the way, fires have charred the terraced hills, along with their pine and olive trees. At bends in the road, signs on the walls of buildings, perched on top of cars and scrawled on concrete walls read "Toward Tyre," directing travelers to relative safety.

"What can we do?" asked Sabah Hashem, a 50-year-old woman, gathered with her family of 16 in a room at the hospital where dentists work. "There's no medicine, there are no supplies. If we try to take people to another hospital, they'll hit the ambulance on the road."

Her niece, 4-year-old Zeinab Hashem, played with a blond doll, on a blanket. The girl's brother slept in a dental chair. Clothes were draped over the equipment. On a sterilizer, a Koran was turned open, black prayer beads laying atop a page.

"Is there no way you can get us out of here?" Hashem asked. "God be with you if you can find us a way."

Her sister Fatima rushed toward her. "Can you get the foreigners to come get us? What about the United Nations?"

Another woman, 70-year-old Fahima Abbas, added her voice.

"If the United Nations would just give us a truce for four or five hours, we could get the people out of here and to Beirut."