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Bombing Obliterates Last Route Out of Tyre
Smoke rises after missiles hit a Tyre apartment complex that was the scene of an Israeli raid Saturday.
(By Ben Curtis -- Associated Press)
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Ashkar, his father, uncle and cousin sat on the stoop of the seaside restaurant, watching blasts across the bay.
"I see the smoke and I hear the sounds," his father, Hussein, said simply, with a hint of world-weariness.
A friend popped his head out the door of the restaurant, where he was watching al-Jazeera. The Lebanese army had warned people in the south not to stand outside in groups bigger than three, he said. A few minutes later, the cousin, Hisham, wandered toward the deserted street. "Don't stand there!" Hisham's father, Mohammed, shouted.
A few more minutes and another sound joined the cacophony of explosions, jets and surveillance drones.
"Be careful, there's a helicopter," Hussein shouted.
Around the corner was the Red Cross office, where Chaalan spoke on his phone to a friend trying to enter Tyre.
"How are you going to come?" he asked. "The road is cut. There's no other way."
Chaalan, a volunteer at the Red Cross since 1993, sat in a broken white plastic chair. "A casualty of war," he called it, smiling. He was waiting to take Tajj al-Din two miles from Jabal Amel Hospital to the Jaafariya school in a Red Cross ambulance. He talked about the stress. The patients expected the volunteers to be calm, assured; and to put it simply, they weren't.
"Every time we go out," he said, "we're not sure if we're going to come back or not. This is what we feel."
Word came from the Red Cross operations office: The roads were too dangerous in Tyre.
He waited, as the volunteers often do. Then permission finally came.
He picked her up at the hospital, where other elderly women had gathered. They all wanted to go home, into the hinterland.
"I looked at them and smiled," he said. "I told them, 'All the people are leaving these villages and you want to go?' "
"The old people," he said, "it's not easy to tell them no."
