Israeli airstrike damages mixed area of Beirut

BEIRUT -- Then the war came to Al Shiyah.

In the jumbled streets with their little sandwich shops and decrepit walls, where laborers and clerks raised their families, a pair of rockets fired from an Israeli warplane Monday evening streaked down and destroyed three apartment buildings.

The blasts crumpled cars like accordions. Apartment buildings collapsed into piles of rubble. Windows shattered for blocks around. The steel shutters of storefronts buckled.

Suddenly, the death and destruction of Lebanon's war invaded a mixed quarter of southern Beirut where Christian and Muslim neighbors had thought they were safe from the lethal standoff between Hezbollah and the Israeli armed forces.

Police said yesterday that 41 people were killed in the attack. The toll has risen steadily as rescuers remove bodies from the rubble.

The nearby suburbs called Dahiya, where Hezbollah is the de facto government, have been pounded repeatedly by Israeli jets since the war began July 12. Most of the residents have fled, leaving the streets empty except for stray dogs and Hezbollah cadres. But Al Shiyah, where Shi'ite Muslims live comfortably with Christians and give their loyalty to the Amal party of parliament speaker Nabih Berri, was not expecting to get hit.

``This is not fair," complained Mohammed al-Husseini, 35, a Brooklyn taxi driver who brought his family to Lebanon on what was supposed to be a vacation.

The Husseini family originally hails from Bint Jba il, he explained, the town in the southern Lebanese hills where Israeli troops and Hezbollah militia fighters have clashed repeatedly in the 28-day-old war. But Al Shiyah was their home now, he said, the place where the clan had come to be safe from the strife that has battered southern Lebanon over 30 years.

Husseini's grandfather, Mohammed Yassin, 75, and his elderly Aunt Aila and Uncle Hussein were sitting at home in Al Shiyah when the missiles struck, he said. Their apartment building was blasted open on one side -- and the three elderly people now were nowhere to be found.

``They were right up there," Husseini said, pointing up to the shell of what had been a modest little apartment, its now ragged curtains flapping in the wind. ``I'm confused," he added. ``I could take my wife and daughter back home, I guess. But I have all my family here."

Dust hung in the hot Middle Eastern sunshine Tuesday as front-end loaders shoved around blocks of concrete and cranes loaded the crumpled cars onto flatbed trucks to cart them away. Husseini watched them work, wondering if and when the bodies of his family members would be uncovered in the mess. Glass shards littered the street around him and ripped-out electricity wires dangled overhead. A neighbor held up two teddy bears picked from the devastation.

``You see what they did, the Israelis?" asked Tony Haddad, a Christian who lives down the street. ``There is no Hezbollah here. No offices. No armed men. Just residential apartments. Women and children."

A pair of young men walked into the street, lumps in the small of their backs betraying pistols in their belts. They questioned several bystanders and then walked away. Soon they returned with a short, gray-haired man in a safari suit. With the two youths at his side as bodyguards, he surveyed the damage, saying nothing.

A giant portrait of Berri looked down on the scene from about a block away. His party, a Shi'ite-based group, has disbanded its militia and become a key player in Lebanon's political system. Berri has been the main conduit for Prime Minister Fouad Siniora and US and other diplomats seeking to pass messages to the well-hidden Hezbollah leadership.

The sun was just setting over the Mediterranean when the war intruded on his followers in Al Shiyah.

Aly Rmaisseh, speaking from his bed in Mount Lebanon Hospital, said he and his wife, Huda, were out on the balcony of their second-floor apartment with several of their children when the first missile landed on their building.

``I didn't hear a thing," he recalled, his head swathed in bandages. ``I didn't realize what was happening. I just felt I was being thrown down, out of control. Then I couldn't move. I tried to move. Then came the second blast."

Nazih Gharios, a physician who heads the hospital staff, said Rmaisseh and his wife , who was lying in the next bed, were lucky because the first blast propelled them through the air from the balcony into the street. The fate of the children who were with them was unclear, Gharios said, but others in the extended Rmaisseh family -- 15 in all -- were inside the apartment and were buried in the rubble.