I am so very grateful that the Israelis are being careful and are not targeting non Hezbollah targets.
WARFARE IN THE MIDDLE EAST
Israeli Missiles Rip Into Medics' Esprit de Corps
By Megan K. Stack, Times Staff Writer
July 25, 2006
TYRE, Lebanon — In the burning haze of the missile strike, Qasim Chaalan thought he had died. But piece by piece, he noticed that he was still there, inside the ambulance. He could still feel his body. He opened his eyes, and discovered he could see.
He and the other medics were lucky: They had survived the blow of an Israeli missile. Dazed and slow, one of the men fumbled for the radio and began, "We have an accident…. " He didn't finish the sentence. A second missile smashed with a roar into the ambulance behind them.
Six Red Cross volunteers were wounded in the Sunday attack, and the injured family they were ferrying to safety suffered fresh agonies. A middle-age man lost his leg from the knee down. His mother was partially paralyzed. A little boy's head was hammered by shrapnel.
Perhaps most dangerous of all, the attack blunted the zeal of the band of gonzo ambulance drivers who have doggedly plugged away as Red Cross volunteers. Young men and women with easy grins and a breezy disregard for their own safety, they have remained as the last visible strand of social structure intact after days of Israeli bombardment.
When the fighting erupted between Israel and Hezbollah, many of the volunteers sent their families north and stayed behind to help their countrymen. Clad in helmets and flak jackets, they brave a rain of Israeli bombs, a crazy maze of cratered roads and perpetual uncertainty over how bad the fighting might become. Fiercely proud of their work at the Red Cross, they had clung desperately to the hope that, as lifesavers, they would be spared.
Many times over nearly two weeks of bombing, medics say, missiles struck the roads nearby; they felt harassed. But somehow, they managed to convince themselves that they were invulnerable to attack.
"We used to kid ourselves, think we couldn't be hit," 38-year-old volunteer Imad Hillal said. "Even in this war, even when bombs fell around us, we never thought we'd be hit. But what happened has changed everything."
Sitting in the radio room at Red Cross headquarters here Monday, Hillal rested his head wearily on one hand. When asked whether the ambulances would continue running, tears clouded his eyes.
The Red Cross team had been sent out into a night that thundered with falling bombs. They'd been assigned to ferry three wounded civilians out of the heaviest battle zone of the southern borderlands on Sunday. One team of medics had headed north from the town of Tibnin, the wounded family stretched flat on gurneys in the back. The other team had rushed south from Tyre to meet them halfway.
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latimes.com |
