Hospitals struggle to treat injured as residents flee Beirut suburb

After the impact of the first Israeli missile strike threw her out of bed, Nadein Nuha al-Din grabbed her screaming granddaughter, brushed off the debris 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 Saleh hospital in Haret Hreik, a densely populated neighbourhood south of Beirut that has been devastated by a week of Israeli air strikes. "It was never like this before, even in the worst days. People are terrified," said Nuha al-Din. "My family in America called me and asked me to leave, but I have a duty to stay." The private hospital's staff had been reduced from 40 to just a handful of doctors and nurses after an Israeli missile strike on 14 July on the nearby highway bridge to Beirut airport blew out windows in the treatment rooms, damaged power supplies and led to a mass exodus from the neighbourhood, a Hizbullah stronghold. Israel is attacking Beirut after Hizbullah captured two of its soldiers, saying it wants Lebanese prisoners held in Israel released. "I have treated 32 people in a week," said one of the remaining doctors, who gave his name only as Haitham. "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." New-born infants lying in cots in the maternity wing, 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 described as a "risk-management plan". Since Israeli air strikes on Beirut's southern suburbs began on 12 July, entire buildings have been turned into piles of rubble, telephone wires trail on roads lined with twisted metal and shattered glass, and the smell of cordite and dust hangs thick in the air. Black-shirted Hizbullah guards with walkie-talkies patrol the area on scooters, preventing access to the inner-most suburb where many buildings used for its bases have been completely destroyed in strikes that have also left adjacent apartment blocks ruined. "This shop fed four families," shouted Moussa Hamdan, 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 cigarettes," said a young man, waving towards the huge piles of broken concrete dotted with red and white packets of Marlboro cigarettes. Hamdan was taking his family to the mountains, he said, to stay with relatives. Just along the Nasrallah highway, named after Hizbullah leader Hassan Nasrallah, staff of the Takbis, a middle-class clothing store in Bir 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 dresses into his car. "Nobody imagined that this level of devastation would happen to us. Even Hizbullah will be questioning itself now. Many innocent people are dying every day, but nobody cares. I won't be coming back here." Farther west of the airport road, security guards prevented IRIN from accessing the Hizbullah-run 'Hospital of the Greatest Prophet'. Volunteer ambulance workers outside the hospital said that since the air strikes began, they had treated scores of wounded civilians from the southern suburbs. They said they had treated only two known Hizbullah militant fighters. "I volunteered to help on 12 July and I haven't seen my family since then," said 19-year-old Ali, an engineering student at the Beirut Arab University who joined Hizbullah 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." HM/SZ/MW/CB