With no money to flee, farmer's family lives in fear

DHAIRA, Lebanon -- The Shi'ite militia Hezbollah has little support in this Sunni Muslim village. Like many of the villages in the border valley, however, Dhaira has taken a beating from Israeli and Hezbollah positions that command the heights on either side.

Tobacco farmer Abou Najeh, 54, said he has remained in the village just a few hundred yards from the Israeli border with his 10 children because he didn't have $100 to charter a taxi to safety earlier in the conflict.

Abou Najeh's family lives in a surreal netherworld. Every day, an unseen Israeli shouts over a megaphone at the villagers to leave. He stopped two days earlier, after almost all of them had left.

They have no bread, but eat the ripening grapes and figs from their fields. They've grown accustomed to the different kinds of rockets and shells fired, counting the seconds from the report of an Israeli rocket fired from the bluff directly above until the crack of its impact on the village of Tair Harfa, on the facing hill.

``We are living in fear," Abou Najeh said, voicing rare nostalgia for the period when Israel occupied the south. ``The days of Israel were better than these days."

Another neighbor, 60-year-old Ilham Abu Samra brought a tray of coffee for reporters waiting for the shelling and rocket fire across the border road to subside so they could return to safety. She sat on the ground at the edge of the road and poured the thick Arabic coffee into gold-lipped cups. ``Did you come to our country to die?" she admonished.

One of her nephews died in the Israeli bombing of a Lebanese Army barracks in Beirut two weeks ago, Abu Samra said, but she chose to stay in one of the most dangerous parts of the country because ``the rest of the time I have left to live is not so long."

Shortly before 11 a.m., firing from the Israeli position subsided. Abu Samra shuffled quickly to a rose bush, and offered three blossoms to the departing visitors.

``Don't think I'm giving you these flowers for a funeral," she said. ``I'm giving them as a wish for your safety."

Half an hour later, 35 Israeli tanks crossed the same patch of road, and moved north into Lebanon.

Thanassis Cambanis