To: TigerPaw who wrote (74261 ) 7/26/2006 12:31:04 AM From: CalculatedRisk Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 361090 Where No One Is Safe On Scene: Ambulance drivers for the Lebanese Red Cross want to know why they too have been targeted by the Israelistime.com Excerpt: One of the ambulances, driven by Qassem Shaalan, had left Tyre at around 10 p.m., having arranged to meet another ambulance coming from Tibnine, some 15 miles away, at Qana, which lies between the two towns. The Tibnine ambulance was carrying three people, a husband and wife and their 14-year-old son. All three had been injured in Israeli artillery shelling around Tibnine and their condition was sufficiently serious to dispatch them to hospital in Tyre. It took Shaalan about 15 minutes to reach Qana, having steered his ambulance around the numerous bomb craters in the road. As usual, the ambulance's lights were on full-beam, the internal light also was on, the revolving blue light was flashing on the roof and the Red Cross flag was lit up. Shaalan wanted everyone to know he was there. The two ambulances stopped next to each other in the middle of the road, engines running and lights still blazing away. The swap only took two minutes — both Red Cross crews had done this before and the whine of a drone and rumble of passing Israeli jets overhead were further incentives for haste. As Shaalan closed the back of the ambulance, however, a missile punched through the roof of the vehicle and exploded inside. "There was a boom, a big fire and I was thrown backwards. I thought I was dead," Shaalan recalls. He opened his eyes and checked himself to see if he was hurt. One of his colleagues, Nader Joudi, was standing, but the third member of the team, Mohammed Hassan, was unconscious. One of the Tibnine medics put through an emergency call to the Red Cross operations room in Tyre that they were under attack. Then a second missile struck the other ambulance. Hassan started regaining consciousness as the medics, all of them hurt, hauled the family out of the back of the ambulance and carried them into a neighboring building. Several more missiles exploded on the road and around the building. The two adults and the boy were lucky to survive, but all had received more wounds. The father's leg was severed by the exploding missile and he was losing blood fast.