Bombing Obliterates Last Route Out of Tyre

TYRE, Lebanon, Aug. 7 -- The nine ambulances were parked outside the Lebanese Red Cross. They couldn't leave -- neither by the road north, which was bombed, nor the road south, which was shelled Monday. Blasts thundered across the Tyre sky, and rumors flew with almost equal vigor: No one could walk outside after 10 p.m., no one should stand in the street in groups bigger than three.

That left Qasim Chaalan, a gentle Red Cross volunteer, with a problem: He had promised to take Khadija Tajj al-Din, a 74-year-old woman, in an ambulance from the Jabal Amel Hospital to a school where her relatives had sought refuge, a trip of a couple of miles.

"You want to help, but you say at any second, it could be your time," Chaalan said.

"You want to make the people feel safe," he added, "but you don't feel it yourself."

For the first time since the war had started, there was no way out of Tyre. And for those left behind, there was no way to get around.

The night before, Israeli aircraft had bombed a pile of powdery sand along a wilting banana plantation that forded the Litani River, what had become the last link between Tyre and the rest of Lebanon. The rest of the bridges along the river, which bisects southern Lebanon, were bombed in the early days of the nearly month-long war. On Monday, Israeli military forces shelled the road to the south, where columns of smoke rose and the whistle of outgoing rockets sounded across the afternoon.

Inside Tyre, besieged and desperate, Israeli missiles struck an apartment complex targeted by an Israeli commando raid last weekend, reducing four five-story buildings to rubble and igniting a fire in a building still standing. The percussion of blasts paralyzed Tyre, transforming the seaside city into a ghost town.

What was supposed to serve as a staging point for relief into southern Lebanon -- the city where aid officials say thousands remain stranded and corpses have rotted in the streets for as many as 10 days -- had become too dangerous for anyone but a few motorcyclists.

"The city is completely cut off from the rest of the world," said Roland Huguenin, a spokesman for the International Committee of the Red Cross, which has been prevented from sending out convoys for three days. "Tyre doesn't have a lifeline now."

At Jabal Amel Hospital, physician Ahmad Mroue slumped in a leather chair, chatting with a colleague, Bassam Mteirak.

"No ambulances," Mroue said, shaking his head.

"The ambulances are here, and they can't go to the buildings over there," Mteirak said.