"You reach a place where you look at life like it's nothing."

Monday, July 31, 2006

Returning from traveling to Sidon on Saturday, I was emotionally
exhausted, physically sick from what I saw.

The first hospital I visited with two photographer friends was the
largest in the south, Hamoudi Hospital. After asking permission, we were
taken to several rooms of patients there.

In the first room, I met 77 year-old Mousa Sif, an old man who sat on
the end of his bed, his eyes expressing a mixture of shock, fatigue, grief and sadness. "The second day of the war the Israelis bombed my home," he
told me.

He, his family and several neighbors had gone to the UN building nearby
their home, seeking shelter, but the UN people sent them back to their
home.

"We were bombed by the Israelis during our trip to the UN, then on our
way back home, several of the vehicles were hit," he told me wearily,
"Then they bombed our home. There were 15 of my family in our house, and
now many of them are dead."

In the next room I met an ambulance driver with one of his arms blown
off. Khuder Gazali, 36 years old, talked to me, his eyes fixed on mine, almost never blinking -- from the shock, anger, and disbelief.

"Last Sunday people came to us and asked us to go help some people who'd
lost their legs when their home was bombed by the Israelis," he
explained of the events that took place in a small southern village,
"We found one of them, without legs, laying in a garden, so we tried to
take him to the nearest hospital."

On the way, an Apache helicopter rocketed his ambulance. The
rocket took off his arm before exploding behind him, critically injuring
everyone in back.

"So then another ambulance tried to reach us to rescue us, but it too
was rocketed by an Apache," he told me while gesturing with his one arm
and explaining that everyone in that ambulance was killed, "Then it was
a third ambulance which finally managed to rescue us."

He pointed to his shoulder, then at another patient who had ridden in his ambulance laying in nearby bed, shrapnel wounds all over his body. "This is a crime," said Khuder, "I want people in the west to know the
Israelis do not differentiate between innocent people and fighters. They
are committing acts of evil. They are attacking civilians and they are
criminals."

After visiting several more patients with similar stories of atrocities,
we found ourselves sitting out in front of the hospital, numb from the
experience.

"We can go to the other hospital now," our interpreter Ayman informed
us. So we loaded into our mini-bus and drove to the Labib Medical
Center, also in Sidon.

Unlike in so many of the hospitals in Beirut, the staff at Labib was more than eager to show us their patients. They were desperate to get the information out to the world. A kind nurse, Gemma Sayer, took us around to each room.

The first person we met was a 16 year-old boy, Ibrahim Al-Hama. He lives
in a village just north of Tyre, and was swimming with 12 of his friends
in a river when they were hit by an Israeli rocket.

"Two of my friends were killed, along with a woman," the boy told us.

In the room next door, a father talked with us whose wife and two small
children, 5 year-old Hussien Jawad and 8 year-old Zayneb, looked on. One
of Hussein's legs was in a cast, while Zayneb had multiple injuries
to her body and butterfly stitches on the bridge of her nose.

They'd stayed in their village near the border during the first three
days of the bombing-but the bombs were getting so close they fled to
another village for eight days.

"We ran out of food, and the children were so hungry, so they left with
my wife and her sister in a car which followed a Red Crescent ambulance,
while another car took the two other sisters of my wife," he explained
sternly, "They reached Kafra village, and an F-16 bombed the car with my
wives two sisters. They are dead. And now you see my wife and children
are injured, and we have nowhere to go."

I could fill pages with the other cases we saw, but this is already long
enough. I didn't sleep well last night, and still feel sick inside. I woke up
Sunday and turned on Al-Jazeera, to watch bodies being pulled from
the wreckage of a shelter in the southern city of Qana which was bombed
by Israeli warplanes.

At least 21 children and dozens of other civilians are dead. Dozens
remain buried in the rubble. So far only three survivors have been
pulled from the wreckage.

The Israeli army rejected responsibility for the deaths, and said that
Hezbollah bore the blame because it used the village for launching rockets.

The same Qana where on April 11, 1996, the Israelis bombed a shelter in
a UN peacekeeping base, killing 102 and wounding 120.