‘Horror and tears’ as Lebanese hospitals fear the same fate as Gaza

The rescuers pounded the concrete with jackhammers, backhoes and even pickaxes, pausing occasionally and demanding silence as they strained to hear anyone still trapped beneath the collapsed building.

Nothing moved under the rubble. They resumed work, many working through the night, after Israel carried out airstrikes on residential buildings across the street from Rafik Hariri University Hospital, killing 18 people, including four children, and wounding 60 on Monday evening.

“They accuse us of belonging to a culture of death, but that is not true: we have a culture of life, we are a people who love life. They are the ones killing us,” said Qassem Fakih, 39, whose skin was ghost white with dust after he dug for hours to find his relatives living in the apartment building. Four of his nieces and nephews, all children, had been pulled dead from the rubble, and he was working to find two more missing relatives.

Rescuers called for a stretcher, they had found a body. A man – Fakih did not know him – was put in a black bag and taken away to be identified.

The small cluster of buildings on the outskirts of Dahiyeh, in Beirut’s southern suburbs, was dubbed “the neighborhood of the neglected.” Its residents were impoverished, some refugees from Syria and Sudan and other Lebanese eking out a living of at most a few hundred dollars a month — “enough to eat and drink,” said one resident as he watched his former home become a excavated concrete building. block at a time.

Just after 10pm on Monday, Israel dropped a bomb on the neglected neighborhood without warning. The Israeli army said it had struck a “Hezbollah terrorist target” near the hospital. As rescuers continued to dig, Fakih climbed atop a destroyed structure and emptied a bag of children’s toys he found in the rubble, shouting, “Look! Do these look like Hezbollah weapons to you?”

The attack took place just 40 meters from the entrance to Rafik Hariri Hospital, the largest public hospital in Lebanon, which suffered “significant damage” according to the Health Ministry.

Dr. Fathallah Fattouh, director of the hospital’s emergency department, said: “When the bombs hit the buildings next to the hospital, they thought it was the hospital itself and there was great concern. Then people started coming out of the shelled area, completely covered in white dust, with blood.”

He pulled out a piece of paper he had used as a triage list the night before and began reading: “Two children in the red zone – seriously injured – five people in the black zone – almost dead – most in the green zone, only slightly injured .” When a building collapses, the people inside are often killed, he said, while those who survive usually have minor injuries from flying debris and broken glass.

An hour before the attack on Rafik Hariri, Israel had issued a statement claiming that Hezbollah was hiding up to half a billion dollars in cash and gold in a bunker beneath another hospital, Al-Sahel, in Dahiyeh. It provided no evidence, but published an animated image of what it claimed to be an underground bunker.

The announcement caused a stampede at Al-Sahel Hospital, where staff, fearing Israel would strike, began evacuating patients.

“The patients were screaming and shouting, there was horror and tears, there was quite a scene. We had about 30 patients and it took us seven hours to evacuate them,” said Dr. Omar Mneimneh. The hospital was temporarily closed to avoid exposing staff and patients to the danger of Israeli bombs.

“If this hospital closes, people undergoing chemotherapy or dialysis will put their lives at risk. Other hospitals are already overloaded because they are already full of the patients who have left southern Lebanon,” said Dr. Mneimneh, an emergency room doctor, adding that Al-Sahel Hospital had a type of dialysis machine that was not available anywhere else can be found.

The hospital opened its doors to journalists on Tuesday afternoon in an attempt to refute Israel’s claims that the facility was being used by Hezbollah to store money. Doctors and Lebanese state security officers watched as journalists inspected hospital beds and a largely empty underground storage space. Hezbollah members stood on the edge of the hospital complex but did not intervene.

“There are no tunnels, there is no money, no gold for Hezbollah. It is a private institution, it does not belong to any party,” said Halimah al-Annan, a nurse and audit team leader who has worked at Al-Sahel since 1985.

While journalists investigated the facility, the Israeli military spokesman published a message on X urging them to inspect an adjacent building, which he claimed had an entrance to an underground bunker. Journalists went to the building’s underground parking garage, but found only old boxes and a few cars, plus a locked storage area.

Israel’s claims of tunnels under major hospitals and the attack near the Rafik Hariri hospital made Lebanese doctors fear they could suffer the same fate as Gaza’s medical facilities. Israel has repeatedly hit hospitals in Gaza over the past year – which the WHO has condemned as a “systematic dismantling of healthcare” – often claiming that Hamas operates in or near them.

Israeli attacks have killed at least 115 health workers in Lebanon over the past year and forced the closure of most hospitals in the border areas and Dahiyeh.

“The risk is increasing, even though it is a humanitarian activity. Things feel more serious now, we are much more exposed (to the risk) of being bombed, of being injured, of dying,” Fattouh said.