In Southern Lebanon, Weary Resignation

"If we're supposed to die, we'll die," he said. "How many times can someone die?" He lifted his finger, his eyelids heavy. "Just once." Baghdadi laughed. "We'll eat, drink and watch the shells fall," Khouri said. "And maybe we'll end up in heaven."

"Give me a cigarette," he said to Bahgdadi.

Khouri, a Christian, was a friend of the family of Baghdadi, 41, a Shiite Muslim. Khouri visited the cafe every day. Baghdadi dropped by to catch up with Khouri at a place he thought safer than his sister-in-law's.

"For me and my kids, if we had a way to go to Ethiopia and it was safe, that's it. Let's get out of here," Baghdadi said.

"That way," Khouri said, pointing south, "it's all destruction. That's not a pity? Since 2000, for six years, everything was rebuilt. In a month, it's all gone." He held up his finger again. "One month."

Then he let loose with a string of expletives about the war.

"What kind of movie do they think they're making?" Baghdadi asked.

They talked about civilians killed on both sides of the conflict, and they predicted the war would go on and on.

"Do you have a plane here?" Baghdadi asked.

"If you do, take us with you," Khouri said.

"What about Michigan?" Baghdadi asked.

The task Sunday for Hammoud, the owner of the 320-bed hospital in Sidon, was finding 50,000 liters of fuel to supplement the 30,000 he already had. Together, that would power the hospital's five generators for 12 days. It was more crucial than the medicine sent to him, piling up in Cyprus because of the blockade. It was more important than the gauze and plaster he was running out of.

"When electricity is gone, there's no hope for anything," he said.

Hammoud has already cut chemotherapy for cancer patients from once a week to once every two weeks. The 160 dialysis patients now receive half their allotted time. In most cases, his hospital tries to receive only war casualties -- more than 300 so far.

"Here it is, the fourth week, and we still don't know," he said. Pictures of Lebanon in better times were on his walls -- a painting of the Roman ruins at Baalbek and a photograph of the medieval port in Sidon. His phone rang often -- he now uses two cellphones, two private land lines and the hospital's 35 numbers. "There's just no hope now. Ask anyone outside."

Hammoud said this war is worse than the 1982 Israeli invasion, one of the most devastating periods of Lebanon's 1975-90 civil war. Back then, his hospital, founded in 1966, was prepared. This time, it wasn't.

"All those times were much easier, much easier than this, to tell you frankly," he said. "In all other wars, you had hope for change or that you would be helped by others. Now you feel you have a war, but is it going to end? What's going to happen?"

"Stop the war, okay, but what then?" he asked.

Hammoud had slept in the hospital every night since the war started, as had his daughter and son-in-law, helping him manage. He expected to keep sleeping there. Uncertainty underlined his words -- how to make war somehow ordinary.

"You can always stay here and work with what you have," he said. "I'm not going to say that I'm going to leave."

Upstairs was one of his 300 full- and part-time doctors, George Fhaily. "I think it's a war for years," he said. "I'm thinking of emigrating. This time is very different."

"It's not an optimistic country," said his colleague, Khalil Hamad.

Hamad and three other doctors were sharing a patients room, the beds unmade. Next to the TV were movies -- "Anger Management" and "Bad Company." The news was turned to al-Manar, the Hezbollah television channel. One of the doctors, Tareq Hussairi, wore a beard he had grown since the war started. "Tired, depressed and anxious," he called himself. Nearly all of them were ready to emigrate.

"We worry about what's going to come after the war -- our homes, our businesses. Some people, their villages are destroyed," he said. The others nodded, talking about the wounded they had treated, the families who had lost relatives. "They'll never go back to the home they remembered," Hussairi said.