6% of Lebanese deaths from Israeli fire in the last year are emergency personnel. 168 of 2,710. Health workers and firefighters, especially. Not as “collateral damage”, but as a target, with missiles directed against the ambulances in which they come to treat the victims of a bombing or directly against the post where they are on guard duty. The Israeli army has also left eight hospitals out of service and another seven, partially, in the north, center and south of the country. These are all data from the Lebanese Ministry of Health, whose head, Firas Abiad, accused Israel last week of carrying out a “deliberate and systematic” campaign with the aim of “sowing chaos and panic” and “generating problems in the authorities.”
There have been 58 air attacks against hospitals and clinics, 158 against ambulances and 72 against fire or rescue vehicles since Hezbollah began hostilities on October 8, but overwhelmingly concentrated in the last weeks of the offensive. The data and testimonies suggest that the Israeli army has brought to its northern neighbor (which invaded on the 1st) the same strategy that it has been applying for more than a year in Gaza: treatment ―in violation of the rules of war― of emergency personnel as legitimate targets (under the accusation that they are part of the enemy or transporting weapons) and the designation of hospitals as enemy hideouts.
The small difference between dead (168) and wounded (275) reinforces the thesis that they are the target, since it is usually much higher. Hussein Fakih has been close to adding to the first fact. He has stayed in the second and tells it with a thread of voice in the bed of the Nabih Berry government hospital, in Nabatiye, a once vibrant city of 40,000 inhabitants in the south of the country that now looks almost deserted.
He is responsible in the Nabatiye region for the state civil defense, emergency services that carry out urgent medical care and fire extinguishing. He went out to treat the victims of three attacks near a civil defense post. He says that, after rescuing a badly injured colleague who died upon arriving at the hospital, they saw another attack, so they headed there.
“We sent our vehicles. Some were putting out the fire; others, lifting the rubble; others, rescuing the wounded. The scene was horrible. There was fire and body parts everywhere,” he recalls. They split up and, as they regrouped, another missile fell, this one about 10 meters from where they were. “We couldn’t see each other anymore. There was smoke everywhere. Once it cleared, we saw that some of us were injured. I had glass and debris all over my body. I lost consciousness for a while and the team took me to the hospital. Only today can I speak again,” he says, tired and sedated.
There is a key word that, in practice, represents a right of veto over health care for the wounded: coordination. That is, the green light from the Israeli military authorities so that ambulances and firefighters can leave. “Sometimes it arrives in five minutes; sometimes in five hours,” explains Shafi Fouani, medical director of the Lebanese People’s Relief hospital in Nabatiye. “Others,” he adds, “tell us no. Or they never respond.”
The Lebanese Red Cross always waits for her and they leave in convoy with the army. Contact the Israeli side, generally through the UN mission in southern Lebanon (Unifil), and wait for their green light, even if you lose critical time for attention. Its ambulances have suffered some attacks, but it is the least affected organization.
The state Civil Defense does not do so, at least in cases like this, north of the Litani River, that is, outside Unifil’s area of operations. “There is always coordination when it comes to the Blue Line. But, who do we have to ask for permission to go to our own homes, our neighbors, to a municipal building…?”, criticizes Fakih. “Working within cities is different. We are far from the border lines, but today the dynamic has changed. “Everything has become an objective.”
In addition to the Lebanese Red Cross and the Civil Defense there are the emergency services of the two major Shiite factions: Hezbollah, the main target of the Israeli offensive, and Amal. The majority of fatalities among emergency personnel (more than 80) belong to Hezbollah’s Islamic Health Committee. Israel has even bombed one of its headquarters in the center of Beirut, killing nine of its health workers, or an ambulance parked in front of the state hospital in Maryayun, seven.
Another two dozen deaths belong to Risala, the boy scoutsfrom Amal. In both cases they are organizations that mix staff and volunteers and have agreements with the Ministry of Health. When they could, they went to help the wounded Hezbollah militiamen. Israel already had them in its sights, in fact, in the previous 11 months of low-intensity war, which was limited to the south of the country, with much more surgical bombings and unwritten rules of the game that have been blown up. in the current war with all the letters.
Some healthcare workers tell, on condition of anonymity, how they have saved the lives or seen colleagues die. They agree that they often receive a barrage of warnings when they are on their way. Just a few dozen meters ahead, to force them to turn back. Others speak of the “second blow”: the one that comes when they go to an attacked place.
One of the deadliest bombings took place on October 7, against the emergency center in Baraashit, a town near the border. He killed 14 firefighters. The army defined it as a “precise, intelligence-based attack against several Hezbollah terrorist operatives using a fire station as a military outpost.”
Three days later, the Israeli army released the following statement: “In recent days, Hezbollah operatives have increased their misuse of emergency vehicles, caught transporting operatives and ammunition. We warn against this practice and ask all medical teams to keep their distance from members of the terrorist organization and not cooperate with them. “Any vehicle in which armed operatives are shown to be carrying out terrorist acts, regardless of the type of vehicle, is a military target.”
“The ambulances do not dare to move even between the posts,” admits Fouani. The majority of health workers, by age, have not experienced the civil war, between 1975-1990, or the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon (1982-2000) or were very children during the previous war between Israel and Hezbollah, in 2006, which It lasted less (34 days) and left fewer dead (more than 1,000) than the current offensive, triggered by the detonation by Mossad of thousands of beepers and walkie talkies commissioned by Hezbollah and, shortly after, the country’s deadliest day in decades. “So they are afraid, of course,” he concludes. “They have seen for months the images in Gaza of [la invasión y bombardeo de los hospitales] Kamal Adwán, Al Shifa, Al Aqsa… and they fear that the same thing will happen,” he says. “Right now we are a field hospital. We have stopped all neonatal, dialysis, gynecology services… In any case, there are no more patients in the city for this. They are gone.”
There was one case in which Israeli military correspondents themselves admitted that the objective was to prevent aid to ensure death. That of Hashem Saifeddine, who was considered Nasrallah’s successor at the head of Hezbollah. The army launched a powerful bomb against a building in Dahiye, the Shiite suburb of Beirut, to kill him on the 3rd. Since then, it has attacked anyone who approached the rubble. Three weeks later, he was officially declared dead: no human being can last that long under those circumstances. In fact, rescue services generally insist that the first 72 hours are crucial and give up the search after a week.
Bombing at 80 meters
The private Sainte-Thérèse hospital is at the entrance to Dahiye, the southern suburb of Beirut that Israel has frequently bombed and killed top Hezbollah leaders, including Nasrallah. From the terrace you can see two columns of smoke, from attacks that same morning, dominating the sky a few hundred meters away. At the foot of the dirt, the streets are empty, the military guarding the entrances to the suburb (the area most affected by the attacks, along with the south of the country) and the windows broken by a bombing the day before. “About 80 meters,” estimates its executive director, Elie Hachem, 33 years old. The explosion has burst pipes, caused flooding and damaged electrical systems, which a worker is busy repairing while standing on a ladder.
The center operates at half capacity. Being at the gates of Dahiye, it receives some serious injuries from the bombings. Most of the staff who have not escaped have brought their families and now live there, for fear of commuting from their place of residence. The close impact of the day before has put even more fear into their bodies. When rumors spread that a new attack is coming, they lower the blinds to the almost non-existent public.
The day before, the Israeli army warned that it would bomb the area. “Twenty minutes earlier, we took a prematurely born child, who weighed 900 grams, from the maternity hospital and took him to the chapel. The worst thing is having to make decisions in seconds, without being clear whether it is riskier to move the incubator or leave it where it was. What we need is for the international community to guarantee us that we are not going to be a target,” says Hachem, more focused on reorganizing resources and consoling staff than indignant.
Another hospital is particularly in the spotlight these days: Al Sahel, near Beirut. It is the new Al Shifa of Gaza, under which Israel located an immense Hamas command center that no one found. These days it is immersed in a dynamic similar to that experienced by the Beirut airport last June, when the British media The Telegraphreported – from anonymous sources who had seen “unusually large boxes” – that Hezbollah was hiding Iranian weapons there.
As it seemed like an interested leak to prepare the ground for its eventual bombing, the airport management organized a tour for journalists to check if it was true. Last week, the Israeli military said Al Sahel hides a Hezbollah “secret bunker” underground with $500 million in cash and gold. The center also organized a tour for the press, to which military spokesmen responded by mocking that they had been shown the wrong area (“Hezbollah doesn’t want you to find the money”), in a pingpong of accusations that seems more intended to use the journalists to obtain intelligence information.
