Hospitals struggle to treat injured as residents flee Beirut suburb

IRIN News
July 21, 2006
http://www.irinnews.org/report.aspx?reportid=59857

By Hugh Macleod
Haret Hreik, Beirut

After the shock wave of the first Israeli missile strike had thrown her out of bed, Madein Nuha al-Din took her screaming granddaughter, brushed off the shattered glass from their ruined apartment in Beirut’s southern suburbs and headed for her local hospital to help treat the wounded.

“We received 14 casualties after the first strike and we tried to help them, but we had to send some to other hospitals,” said the 48-year-old nurse, standing in the empty reception area of the smart Sahel hospital in Haret Hreik, a ramshackle, densely populated neighbourhood south of Beirut that has been devastated by a week of Israeli airstrikes.

“It was never like this before, even in the worst days. People are terrified,” said Nuha al-Din, tears welling in her eyes. “My family in America called me and asked me to leave, but I told them I am staying. I have a duty to stay.”

The private hospital’s staff has been reduced from 40 to just a handful of doctors and nurses after an Israeli missile strike last Friday on the nearby highway bridge running south to Beirut airport blew out windows in the hospital’s treatment rooms, damaged power supplies and led to a mass exodus of people from the neighbourhood, a stronghold of the Hezbollah militia group.

“I have treated 32 people in a week,” said one of the remaining doctors, who gave his name only as Haithem. “Most had suffered shrapnel wounds from flying glass. We have enough medical supplies for a couple of weeks, but after that I don’t know what will happen.”

Newly born infants lying in cots in the maternity wing of the hospital, just meters from the missile’s crater, had been evacuated only hours before the strike as part of what hospital president Maher Jamel al Din said was a “risk management plan.”

 

Since Israeli airstrikes on Beirut’s southern suburbs began a week ago the once colourful and claustrophobic neighbourhood, home to thousands of Lebanon’s impoverished Shia Muslims, has been transformed into a deserted ruin.

Entire buildings have been flattened into piles of grey rubble, telephone wires dangle into roads lined with twisted metal and shattered glass and the smell of cordite and dust hangs thick in the grey air.

Black-shirted Hezbollah guards with walkie-talkies patrol the area on scooters, preventing access to the inner most suburb where many buildings that were bases for the group have been completely destroyed in strikes that also left adjacent apartment blocks ruined.

“This shop fed four families,” shouted Moussa Hamden, struggling to salvage boxes of plastic cups and containers from the burned out shell of what used to be his family business and home. The building was destroyed after three Israeli missiles slammed into an adjacent warehouse on Thursday morning, residents said.

“That was a storage warehouse for boxes of cigarettes,” said the young man, waving his hands towards the huge piles of broken concrete dotted with red and white packets of Marlborough cigarettes.

Hamden was taking his family to the mountains, he said, to stay with relatives. Just along the Nasrallah highway, named after Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, staff of the Takbis, a middle class clothing store in Beer al Abed, were also packing up and leaving the city.

“Every minute I am losing money,” said store owner Ibrahim as his staff hurriedly packed piles of dresses into his car. “Nobody imagined that this level of devastation would happen to us. Even Hezbollah will be questioning itself now. Many innocent people are dying every day, but nobody cares. I won’t be coming back here.”

Further west of the airport road, security guards prevented IRIN from accessing the Hezbollah-run ‘Hospital of the Greatest Prophet’ by security men. Volunteer ambulance workers outside the hospital said that since the airstrikes began a week ago they had treated scores of wounded civilians from the southern suburbs, but just two known Hezbollah militant fighters.

“I volunteered to help on July 12 and I haven’t seen my family since then,” said 19-year-old Ali, an engineering student at the Beirut Arab University who joined Hezbollah after his father was killed fighting for the militia group in 1988 by Israeli soldiers. “We are working for God, and I hope this work can help us to victory and a happy ending.”