Just a Bump in the Beltway

Juan Cole:

I have noted before that it isn't very nice to make people leave their homes and then bomb them as they leave:

Southern villagers run gauntlet in search of refuge

By Nicholas Blanford
Special to The Daily Star
Monday, July 24, 2006

SIDDIQINE: With an expression of utmost calm on her blood-masked face, the woman allowed herself to be gently lowered from the roof of the mini-bus into the waiting arms of two Lebanese Red Cross volunteers. The rescue workers had extracted her through a jagged hole in the roof of the crumpled mini-bus, the result of a missile fired minutes earlier by an Israeli helicopter which had blasted the vehicle off the road. Left behind in the vehicle, slumped over each other and soaked in blood, were the bodies of three people.

The narrow roads that meander through the valleys and undulating chalky hills east of Tyre were a place of terror and death Sunday, with Israeli helicopters attacking civilian vehicles fleeing Israel's onslaught against South Lebanon.

"Today is the day of the cars," says Dr. Ahmad Mrowe, director of the Jabal Amal hospital in Tyre. "It's been very bad."

By early evening, the Jabal Amel Hospital alone had received 41 wounded, most of them serious, according to hospital sources, all of the casualties thought to be civilians seeking refuge north of the Litani River after heeding Israeli warnings to leave the area before the onslaught intensifies.

The level of destruction and the dangers of traveling along these bomb-cratered roads were made clear within moments of leaving the perimeter of Tyre, which has become a relative safe haven compared to the town's hinterland.

In the Horsh district outside Tyre, an aerial bomb had gouged a deep crater in the middle of the wide road, blocking passage. A short detour down a lane and through an orange orchard led back to the main road. But there were more craters, perhaps one every kilometer, most of which were passable by inching around the rim of the hole.

The streets of Hannawiyyeh and Qana were littered with broken glass, severed electricity cables, lumps of earth, ripped sheet metal from store fronts, stones and pieces of concrete, the result of Israeli shellfire into these sprawling dusty villages. Many houses showed signs of shell damage - broken windows, shell-pocked roofs and smashed walls. The signs of hasty flight by panicked residents could be found in the crashed and abandoned cars on the side of the road. One had run full speed into a corner of a house, the front of the vehicle squashed to half its size. Another had struck an electricity pylon. Israeli jets rumbled overhead amid the almost constant hollow thump of artillery fire.