Wounded arriving en masse at hospitals, residents fleeing in haste: terror reigned Monday in the south of Lebanon where the Israeli air force dropped a carpet of bombs, killing at least 182 people.
Concern has spread to the capital, Beirut, which has so far been spared from the conflict between the pro-Iranian Hezbollah and Israel, with residents receiving Israeli warnings on their cell phones and landlines.
“It’s a catastrophe, a massacre,” Jamal Badrane, a doctor at the Secours Populaire hospital in Nabatiyé, a town in the south, told AFP.
“The strikes do not stop, they bombed us while we were withdrawing wounded” from another area in the south.
The Health Ministry announced that the incessant raids since the morning on the south of the country had left 182 dead and more than 700 injured, the heaviest toll in almost a year of violence.
The Israeli army, for its part, indicated that it had targeted more than 300 Hezbollah sites in Lebanon on Monday.
“The wounded are arriving non-stop. The situation is very difficult, I cannot count the victims, the wounded are in the street,” said an employee of the public hospital in Tebnine, in southern Lebanon, who did not give his name.
Traffic jams
The constant raids have forced hundreds of southerners, who had previously remained at home despite daily bombardments, to flee.
In the coastal city of Tyre, further south, “hundreds of people have arrived” at a school sheltering displaced people, said Bilal Kachmar, an official with the disaster management agency, while others are “camping in the street”.
“Others are sitting on the street waiting” to be housed, he added.
Hundreds of cars carrying families were stuck in traffic jams in Saida, the major southern city, according to AFP photographers.
Nazir Rida, a journalist, hastily left Beirut to go under the bombs to look for his family, who live in the village of Babiliyah.
“No one expected this sudden escalation. Our village was until now safe from the bombings,” he told AFP, stuck in a traffic jam in Saida.
“I went to my job in Beirut and left my children in the village, which is considered safer than the southern suburbs of Beirut.”
This Hezbollah stronghold where he resides was targeted on Friday by a deadly strike targeting a Hezbollah military leader, which left 45 people dead, including many civilians.
Education Minister Abbas Halabi announced the closure of schools across the country on Tuesday.
“The bombs fell in a neighborhood where there are schools in Nabatiyeh,” said Azraa Kanso, a teacher in the town.
“If students came to school […] “This would have caused chaos.”
Buildings evacuated
Panic spread to the capital, where residents and offices received Israeli warning messages.
“I received a message on my mobile phone saying: ‘If you are in a building where there are Hezbollah weapons, stay away from the village until further notice,'” Khaled, a resident of the capital who did not want to give his last name, told AFP.
The same message, recorded, reached landlines at several offices, including that of Information Minister Ziad Makary, located in an area housing several ministries in the capital.
“The landline phone rang […] When the minister’s assistant answered, she heard a recorded message asking (staff) to evacuate the building or face bombing,” the minister’s office said.
The official Lebanese radio station, located in the same building, received a similar message and the building was evacuated, an AFP photographer noted.
An office building in the Hamra commercial district was also evacuated following such messages.
The Minister of Information denounced a “psychological war” by Israel.
Schools and daycare centers in central Beirut have asked parents to pick up their children in the middle of the day, according to parents.