Survivors Rise From Rubble Of Battered Lebanese Village

Namad Baidoun, traumatized by 20 days of Israeli bombing, screams as she walks out of the shattered ruins of her village of Bint Jbeil in southern Lebanon. (Photos By Michael Robinson Chavez -- The Washington Post)

"Men can walk," one of the Lebanese Red Cross workers told him.

The region around Bint Jbeil, like most of southern Lebanon, delivers Hezbollah much of its support, and signs of the organization's reach were still evident in many villages. Along one rural street, a green truck without license plates was concealed by camouflage. On the road from Bint Jbeil, two men loaded the trunk of a Mercedes with green boxes of ammunition. The corpse of what appeared to be a fighter, his torso barely intact, lay in a grassy field. An ambulance worker covered it with a blanket, anchoring it with two stones. Hezbollah operatives on motorcycles and foot traveled the streets with walkie-talkies, sometimes helping with the evacuation.

"Everyone's leaving," said Ali Bazzi, one of those fleeing.

Along the street, others erupted in anger. "Twenty days!" one man shouted. "There are people still buried under the rubble. Until now, they're there. Go see the suffering in Bint Jbeil. Go! Go!" He held a clump of parsley. "God is greater than Israel!"

Bazzi was quieter, as he walked with his relatives.

"Bint Jbeil is all destroyed," he said. "No one can go back. The whole village is destroyed."

An abandoned green Mercedes marked the entrance, its windows shattered. A little beyond was a red van, its roof struck by a rocket. The doors were ripped open to expose an espresso machine, its chrome still shiny.

"We're feeling guilty leaving people behind," said Fouad Taha, a physician and the director of Salah Ghandour Hospital. "What can someone do at this point? If he's injured now, he's going to bleed to death."

The hospital was darkened; fuel for the generator ran out Saturday. Pieces of the roof were scattered on the floor. The door was blown into the lobby. Taha was wearing someone else's scrubs; his were too bloody and there was nowhere to wash them.

"Now the cats are wandering in," he said, pointing down a sunlit hallway.

Taha was the last doctor left at Bint Jbeil's 42-bed hospital, along with a staff of five. It used to number 40. Ten bodies were still in the morgue. Two days before, he said, a rocket hit the room where he had been sleeping, scattering concrete over his mattress on the floor. Just a few minutes earlier, he had gone to join a friend, who had offered him tea in another room.

The hospital was affiliated with Hezbollah's sprawling welfare apparatus. "The resistance is your glory and your pride so support it," read a yellow-and-blue box for donations in the corner of the lobby. But Taha was not in a martial mood. "I just want to make sure there are no civilians left in Bint Jbeil," he said. "I have 48 hours," he added. "I assume today is okay, and tomorrow I'm leaving."