Fear and defiance among few civilians left to face Israeli onslaught

IRIN News
August 4, 2006
http://www.irinnews.org/report.aspx?reportid=60123

By Hugh Macleod
Nabatiyeh, south Lebanon

On the road north out of Tyre, past three meter deep craters filled with mangled cars and a cattle pen jammed with dead or dying cows left to starve after their terrified owner fled, a few cars and minibuses carrying the last families to flee the ongoing Israeli bombardment of south Lebanon speed along.

Just before Sidon, the road forks east up into the Aamel Mountains and absolute solitude.

Entire towns stand deserted, shops are boarded up, bridges lie collapsed across the road, while broken electricity lines flail in the wind.

The once bustling market town of Nabatiyeh, a Shia majority stronghold of Hezbollah support where the faces of the martyrs killed fighting Israel fly on flags, is watched over now by a handful of grocers and roaming cats.

“Every rocket that lands here is like a sugar coated almond to us,” said 74-year-old grocer Hani Hamadi, sitting beside untouched piles of fruit and vegetables in the central square of Nabatiyeh. Though his customers had dropped from thousands to “hundreds” – most of whom had taken advantage of the relative safety of a two-day ceasefire earlier in the week to do their shopping – the old man remained confident for the future of south Lebanon.

“As long as we have the resistance the Israelis will not be able to take one inch of our land,” he exclaimed, as Hezbollah affiliated En Nour radio station blared out military marching music behind him.

Across town, sheltering in the basement of one of the few houses left undamaged by nights of shelling and aerial bombardment, Sheikh Muslim, an elderly caretaker, said it was time for both sides to bring the conflict to an end.

“I hope both sides can agree on a deal to end the fighting,” said the elderly man, originally from Syria’s northern capital of Aleppo but who has lived in Nabatiyeh for two decades. “Every day is a day full of danger now. The aircraft are the most difficult to deal with. If it is just shelling then I can sleep, but not when the planes are dropping bombs.”

Known as Hayal al Bayad, after the white earth on which it was founded, much of the west quarter of the town is now covered in a thick grey coating of blasted cement.

On a wall beside the mangled wreck of a delivery van and rags caught in tangled electricity cables one former resident of the area had left an open Quran on a wall, its pages turning over in the breeze as the local mosque sounded the call to prayer.

The caretaker said that the last of the Lebanese families who had been sheltering in the next door basement had fled Nabatiyeh after hearing of the deaths of civilians sheltering in a similar way in Qana. Now the old man’s only company are scores of cats and six canaries, two of which he said had died recently from the shock of Israeli air strikes.

His support for Hezbollah, however, remained unwavering:

“Of course I support them. Does it require two people to sit down and discuss it?” he asked, using a well known Arabic expression. “As long as the people inside the country are united nobody can come in.”

Sleepless nights and the fear of death are not the only suffering the Israeli military has brought into the life of 18-year-old Munier Tawbe, the young man who dashes out to greet our car as we haul up to the top of Arnoun.

The mountain-top village is just 5km from Israel’s border and is on the frontline of conflict as the Israeli military launches its largest ground offensive into Lebanon since its 1982 invasion.

Seven years ago, when Israel still occupied the village, Tawbe had his elbow broken by Israeli soldiers after an argument over barbed wire. It was not the first time he had received such a beating.

“This time there will be no occupation, we will die before that happens,” he said, sitting in a house set against the dramatic ruins of Beaufort castle, the mountain top fortress just above Arnoun that has been a strategic stronghold in the wars for the Holy Land for everyone from Christian crusaders to Palestinian militants to Jewish conscripts.

Munier, his mother, three sisters and younger brother are the last family remaining in the upper part of Arnoun. Of the estimated 1,500 people who live in Arnoun, only three households remain.

The sound of Israeli artillery pounding suspected Hezbollah positions in the valley below is almost constant, while three days of Israeli air strikes over the village have left Munier and his family, all of whom, according to locals, suffer from epilepsy, unable to sleep.

“We cannot leave because we cannot rent a house and we do not have family elsewhere so we have been living in the basement,” explains the young man, whose father died when he was a child.

The family are living off fried potatoes and food contributions from the few Lebanese soldiers remaining to man a checkpoint at the foot of the road leading up to the village.

“When the shelling is going we just sit in the basement and think about our lives or I try and analyse the sounds of the shells to work out where they are going to land,” said Munier, looking over the scorched earth less than 10 meters from his house, evidence of shelling landing perilously close.