Peril on the streets

Residents of old city in Lebanon stay inside after Israel warns that moving vehicles could be targets

BY MATTHEW MCALLESTER AND MOISES SAMAN | Newsday Staff Correspondents

August 9, 2006

TYRE, Lebanon - All but the crazy or the desperate are staying inside now or perhaps walking gingerly under awnings at the side of the road and in the narrow alleys of Tyre's old city. Yesterday and the night before, Israel delivered the message that any moving vehicle was now a target.

So the already quiet streets of Tyre became a virtual car-free zone following the warning that was delivered through the media and on leaflets dropped by the Israeli military, suspicious that weapons would be transported.

All the roads out of the city are either cut off by fighting or destroyed by the Israeli military. But that seems academic now: Just to step into the open is to risk being picked off in an air strike by one of the invisible Israeli killing machines in the sky. With Israeli politicians indicating yesterday that their army may soon push deeper into Lebanon - north of Tyre and thus surrounding it - the few remaining residents of the old city began to talk about what they would do if Israeli troops attacked.

Few here showed the stomach for a street battle against invading Israeli troops. Tyre's old city is a UNESCO World Heritage site and home to invaluable Roman and other ruins. The largest chariot-racing hippodrome ever built by the Romans is in Tyre. You can turn a corner and find yourself face-to-face with Roman columns as elegant as those at the Forum in Rome.

The outlying areas of Tyre may be Hezbollah territory, but the old city is not. Katyusha rockets are not fired from here to Israel. This war is not one that most people in the old city want a part of. "We won't fight," said Khaled Koratian, 40, a volunteer firefighter and paramedic with the city's Civil Defense. "There are other people for fighting."

The director at Bachour Hospital in the old city, where the aid group Médecins Sans Frontières, or Doctors Without Borders, is based, said all beds were empty now, ready for an influx of casualties should Israel attack.

"We received yesterday two trucks of medication and instruments from MSF and we have two functional operating rooms and 40 beds," Dr. Antoine Hallaj said. "If there will be war in the town we can receive civilian injuries, moderate and serious." He said he believes Israeli troops will try to take Tyre, the largest town in the southern part of Lebanon, where battles are raging between Israel and the militant group Hezbollah.

There are two MSF doctors at Bachour - Hallaj's mother owns it - and five Lebanese. There are usually 30 doctors working at the hospital. The rest have fled the south, including Hallaj's wife, also a doctor at Bachour, who took their six children to stay with relatives in Beirut.

A few people wandered yesterday among the stone alleys of the old city, which during normal times throng with vendors hawking vegetables and household goods.

Zuhair Arab, 53, was on his own, looking for food. In his pocket he carried an empty packet of pills and a small piece of card upon which he had written the names of another medication his wife needed. Local charities had told him they didn't have food or medication to give him.

"For eight days I can't find medication for my wife," said Arab, a carpenter who wore torn jeans and paint-spattered sandals. He said she has some kind of throat and head condition.

"They tell me to go to the pharmacy," he said. "I don't have the money. They have many boxes but they won't give me any." He walked on to continue his search.

In a café, 12 men sat playing cards and drinking coffee, happily out of sight of Israeli drones, the war playing out on a television that drowned out the booms from nearby Israeli bombs.

A dozen young men swam in the Mediterranean, laughing that they would fight Israel if the soldiers came but then turning serious and acknowledging they would sit it out inside.

Rabia Khatoun, a Bangladeshi nanny for a Christian family that has stayed behind, encountered a Newsday photographer on the street, saying she had not spoken to her family in Bangladesh for six months.

When the photographer handed her his cell phone, she called home, spoke to her family and burst into tears.

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Residents of old city in Lebanon stay inside after Israel warns that moving vehicles could be targets

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