Peoples Geography — Reclaiming space

Creating people's geographies

As Shelling Continues, Few Residents Remain in Towns That Once Took Refugees

August 7, 2006 | NY Times

Escaping

INSAR, Lebanon, Aug. 6 — It took weeks of continuous shelling in southern Lebanon and one long sleepless night for Sheik Naim Hazir to admit it was time to leave.

What forced his decision was the death of five of his next-door neighbors — three of them children — as a rocket flattened their two-story home in a raid overnight Saturday. But getting out of Insar with his 90-year-old father and 82-year-old mother was tricky.

Just below his terrace on Sunday, Sheik Hazir could see the bombed-out house where the neighbor, Ibrahim Assi, his two daughters, his niece and his nephew died in the middle of the night. Inside the empty home bent double by the blast, a walking stick leaned untouched next to a sofa.

The trail of war has reached into Insar, a small town on the hills halfway between the coastal city of Tyre and the hilly town of Nabatiye. For the few people still trapped in southern Lebanon, leaving is an ordeal. Gasoline is scarce, taxis are charging outrageous fees to go to Beirut or Sidon, and most of the inhabitants who remain behind are either too old, too tired or too poor to leave.

To make matters worst, Sheik Hazir said, his car had broken down, and the battery on his cellphone had died. Without power, he had no way of recharging it. Eventually, by borrowing a cellphone, he managed to reach a nephew in Beirut who arranged for a relative to pick the three of them up.

“No car, no phone, nobody,” he said while on the terrace of his family home in Insar. “The refugees came to this town first. Now the refugees are all gone, and it’s our turn to become refugees.”

More than 12 hours after the blasts that killed his neighbours he seemed harassed, nervous and terrified. He was eager to leave. Sunday night was one of the worst in recent weeks, he said. Overhead, Israeli drones kept buzzing, rattling nerves. The sound of airstrikes echoed around the deserted streets. In the next town, the Israeli Air Force kept shelling repeatedly. Further into the distance, more shelling.

The relentless Israeli assault is emptying southern Lebanon. On the road between the coast and Nabatiye, there is nothing but shuttered stores, closed shops, drawn curtains and locked doors.

Chamoun Assaf, director of the Lebanese Red Cross unit in Nabatiye, said those who died in Insar did not appear to have been fighters. “Some people cannot leave,” Mr. Assaf said. “They have no place to go, no transportation. Some don’t want to leave. They’d rather die in their homes.”

Few souls remained behind, though. One of them was Muhammad Assi, a 73-year old construction worker who decided to remain in town because, he said, no one else was left to feed his birds and cats. One of his sons was killed in 1984, he said, and another was wounded, in fighting against occupying Israeli troops in southern Lebanon.

“In this war, right is wrong and wrong is right,” said Mr. Assi, a distant relative of the family killed when the house was hit. “There is no one left. That’s what Israel wants.”


The victims of Sunday’s strike were taken to the morgue in Nabatiye’s government hospital, which was built on a hilltop in the late 1990’s with grants from Kuwait’s government.

Inside the hospital morgue, there are bodies that were brought in more than 10 days ago and have not yet been claimed by their relatives.

The wounded had been patched up by the doctors and sent home.

“We either get light wounds or dead people,” said Doctor Hassan Wasni, the hospital’s director.

Ibrahim Hassan Mansour, a 70-year-old retiree, survived the attack on Insar after he was pulled out of the rubble of his home by the Red Cross. He was sleeping on a simple mattress on the floor when the roof fell on him. He was shielded by a nearby sofa.

His son, Dr. Ali Mansour, is a cardiologist at the hospital.

“When I got the call about my father, I couldn’t believe his luck coming out of this alive,” he said.

What happened in Insar is just a footnote in this conflict. On the same day, 12 Israeli soldiers were killed in a Hezbollah rocket attack; in Lebanon, 18 people died. Chances of a cease-fire were slim.

Waiting for the car to pick him and his parents up, Sheik Hazir recalled his night.

“I had just turned off the television after watching the news, and I was getting ready to go to bed when I was thrown to the floor by the blast,” said the sheik, a teacher of social and religious studies at a community school in Tyre.

“Dust engulfed my room,” he said. “I crawled to see my mother and led her into the kitchen, where we believe it’s safer. But nothing is safe here.”

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This entry was posted on 7 August, 2006 by in Empire, War and Terror, Human Rights, Israel, Lebanon.

Timely Reminders

"Those who crusade, not for God in themselves, but against the devil in others, never succeed in making the world better, but leave it either as it was, or sometimes perceptibly worse than what it was, before the crusade began. By thinking primarily of evil we tend, however excellent our intentions, to create occasions for evil to manifest itself."
-- Aldous Huxley

"The only war that matters is the war against the imagination. All others are subsumed by it."
-- Diane DiPrima, "Rant", from Pieces of a Song.

"It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there"
-- William Carlos Williams, "Asphodel, That Greeny Flower"


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