No Place to Go
Jul 21st, 2006 at 6:36 am by Susie
Lebanon is like Katrina, only with artillery instead of wind and rain:
The displaced, who are washing up here with their elderly and babies in tow, spoke of villages besieged for days while missiles crashed down. Many seemed too dazed and exhausted to form articulate escape plans or think through the dangers they faced.
Civil structure appears to have broken down almost completely. Ambulances haven’t been able to operate. The dead are rotting in the rubble of smashed homes. Food and clean drinking water are running out. Nearly 100 bodies have piled up in a poorly refrigerated container at a hospital in a Palestinian refugee camp close to Tyre; there’s too much violence to pick up the dead or to hold funerals.
How the evacuation messages were transmitted en masse to cellphones was not clear. The order also was repeated on Voice of the South, an Israeli-run radio station that had gone silent after Israeli soldiers withdrew from Lebanon in 2000 — only to be resurrected last week as combat flared between Israel and the Hezbollah militants who control Lebanon’s southern borderlands.
Asked about the evacuation orders, an Israeli military spokesman, Capt. Jacob Dallal, warned that “it’s for their overall safety not to be there.”
