Ambulance drivers tell tales of horror

TYRE, Lebanon -- The ambulance drivers had survived a catalogue of horrors over the last week.

Artillery shots shadowed them along mountain roads. A motorcyclist was blown into thin air in front of them. They struggled to reach bombed buildings full of corpses through a hail of Israeli ordnance.

But inside their ambulances, the paramedics of the Lebanese Red Cross, Station 702, felt safe.

So Kasim Shaalan, who thought nothing more could shock him in this 13-day war, was shocked Sunday night when he closed the rear door of his ambulance and it exploded, seriously wounding two patients inside.

``When we drove our ambulances before, even if the bombs fell close to us, we were not afraid," Shaalan said at the Jebel Amil Hospital in Tyre yesterday, where he was being treated for minor shrapnel wounds and internal bleeding in his ear. ``Now, we must be afraid."

The Israel Defense Forces said last night that Israeli fire hit an ambulance during fighting in the Qana area, east of Tyre. ``The IDF never intentionally targets civilians, much less ambulances," a spokesman said. ``It should be noted that the area in which the incident took place is one from which there is intensive missile fire" directed toward Israel.

Lebanese officials have complained that Israel has bombed indiscriminately, struck fleeing civilians, and targeted trucks carrying aid. Bomb craters have left many roads impassable south of the Litani River, a region that is home to 400,000 people. Roads leading out of cities including Tyre, Nabatiyeh, and Tebnine have come under fire.

``We are obliged to go out and save people," said Imad Hillal, 38, the second-in-command at the Tyre branch of the Red Cross. ``We count on Israel to respect the neutrality of the Red Cross, but they don't."

Israel says it is attacking Hezbollah militia targets in southern Lebanon that have fired hundreds of Katyusha rockets at civilian population centers in Israel over the 13-day conflict.

Yesterday morning, the national Lebanese Red Cross grounded the ambulances for a few hours, but by afternoon volunteers were donning their orange flak jackets and white helmets with red crosses, and making ambulance runs across the south.

Since the Israeli offensive began, the local Red Cross volunteer paramedics have provided the sole ambulance service in the south, ferrying patients from the hardest hit areas near the Israeli border to Tyre, and from there north to safer cities like Sidon or Beirut.

The Tyre office is staffed by about 25 volunteers, about half the usual number. During normal times, the volunteers work one shift a week. Now, the volunteers stay in the low-slung concrete headquarters around the clock.

Shaalan, 28, sells spare parts at his father's shop. Another paramedic in the ambulance hit Sunday night, Nader Judeh, runs a record store; he's a Metallica fan. The driver, Mohammed Hassan, is nicknamed ``Abou Harb," or ``Father of War" because he was born when his mother was fleeing during an early clash with Israel in 1971.

Just after 10 on Sunday night, the Tyre office got a routine call to pick up three patients who were being ferried from the city of Tebnine, deep in the south near the Israeli border and the heaviest fighting.

An ambulance from Tebnine met the crew from Tyre in the mountain town of Qana. The three patients were settling into the back of the ambulance. Shaalan said he was swinging the back door shut when everything around him was engulfed in a flash of light.

``A big fire came toward me, like in a dream. I thought I was dying, at first," Shaalan said. ``Then I opened my eyes, and I could see. I thought everyone in the ambulance was dead."

A rocket or missile had made a direct hit through the roof, Shaalan said, severing one patient's right leg. Shaalan took cover in a nearby building.

The paramedics used a cellphone to call the Tyre office to send another ambulance to pick them up.

It took nearly an hour and a half for help to arrive, because this time the local medics demanded assurances from the Israelis -- via the International Committee of the Red Cross -- that they would not be hit.

The six paramedics escaped serious injury, suffering light shrapnel wounds. Judeh's helmet stopped a volley of shrapnel .

An elderly woman patient was relatively unscathed, but Mohammed Mustafa Fawaz, 46, was in the intensive care unit, the stump where his right leg used to be swollen and bleeding.

His son was semiconscious in the room next door, suffering from a concussion and internal injuries.

Yesterday, after a night of bombings that shook the valley above Tyre, the paramedics projected good cheer. Shaalan, after a hospital lunch and a bedside visit from a half-dozen volunteers, peeled the bandages off his face and went to see his mother.

``I told her I'd be fine," he said, as he returned to the Red Cross office to dress his wounds again and spend the night with his comrades. Last night, the war went on around them. Israeli rockets hit a building around the corner, and the zip of outgoing rockets, presumably fired by Hezbollah, could be heard on the Tyre waterfront.

Globe correspondent Alon Tuval contributed from Jerusalem.