Struggle to reach wounded

By Nicholas Blanford

07/21/06 "The Times" -- -- -YELLING for people to move aside, medics burst into the emergency room of the Jabel Amel hospital in Tyre carrying a woman, her head lolling and her body daubed in blood. "Allah Akhbar," moans the latest victim of Israel's onslaught on southern Lebanon.

The woman was one of five people - four women and a young man - whose car had been hit by an Israeli jet on a road near Bourgheliyeh, a tiny, ramshackle village off the coastal road about 6km north of Tyre.

"Two bombs fell next to each other 15 metres in front of the car," Jihad Daoud, 22, said as he watched his relatives being treated by doctors.

The woman was fortunate. She made it to the hospital. But out in the hinterlands between the Israeli border and the Litani river, the heart of the war zone where the bombardment is most relentless, witnesses say casualties are dying untreated.

UN armoured convoys cannot retrieve the dead and wounded for fear of being shelled themselves and because the roads are so badly cratered. The dead are being left to rot beneath the rubble of their homes.

Nor can the UN force, Unifil, deliver food, water and other basic supplies to their own observation posts near the border or to scores of Lebanese villages cut off by the fighting.

Unifil is unable even to retrieve its own casualties. Two civilian staff members, a husband and wife from Nigeria, are thought to have been killed in an Israeli raid on Horsh, just south of Tyre, on Tuesday. A convoy of Chinese engineers was unable to reach the scene that day because of Israeli shelling.

On Wednesday, Unifil could not send any armoured convoys because of the intensity of the shelling and air raids around Tyre.

Ahmad Mrowe, the exhausted director of Jabel Amel hospital, said one civilian casualty who arrived on Wednesday had been ferried by eight cars from the village of Siddiqine, each driving from one crater to the next. It took eight hours to cover a distance that usually takes 20 minutes.

In the hospital's intensive care unit lay Alia Alieddine, 30, one of only two casualties to reach the hospital from the village of Srifa, 16km east of Tyre. Israeli jets flattened four homes there overnight. Villagers recovered 10 bodies but another 25 were thought to still be lying under the rubble.

Connected to breathing tubes and her head heavily bandaged, Ms Alieddine stared blankly at the ceiling.

"She suffered major head wounds. Her arm is broken and she lost a lot of blood," Dr Abdullah Abbas said.

"Her chances are not good. It is in God's hands."

With Tyre almost cut off from the north, the hospital is running short of supplies. Dr Mrowe said: "We only have enough food and drinking water to last another five or six days. We will stay anyway. We'll never leave."

The Israeli military has broadcast warnings before its raids and hundreds of villagers fled before the shells and missiles struck. The Israelis are also hitting targets that they believe have links to Hezbollah.

But among the refugees crammed into the Rest House hotel in Tyre, few blamed Hezbollah for their misery.

When an Arabic channel announced that Haifa in Israel had been struck again by the group's rockets on Wednesday, one man declared to general assent: "Let them suffer as we are suffering."

The Times