In hunt for Hezbollah, Israel is devastating south Lebanon

BORJ QALAUIYA, Lebanon — Ali Jishi, a nurse working at the health center of a town in southern Lebanon, thought she was calm enough after eating dinner to deliver supplies to the civil defense team down the road.

He was returning Friday and watched as Israel’s missile lance flew through four floors of the building, killing his father and 11 of his colleagues.

“I would have been there ten minutes earlier or 10 seconds later. He would have caught me too,” Jishi said.

Two days after the attack, Jishi, 35, walked through the blasted shell of the building, past pieces of wall hanging from bent metal rods, and peered into the mouth still smoldering where the missile had struck.

The explosion had reduced everything to gray mulch, and the occasional object could be made out: a brochure on reproductive health, pill strips that looked somewhat intact, the crumpled remains of a desktop computer.

The Israeli military said the incident in Borj Qalaouiyah was under investigation. However, a day after the attack, the army’s Arabic-speaking spokesman accused Hezbollah of using ambulances for military purposes.

The latest conflict between Israel and the Iranian-backed Shiite group was triggered by the US and Israel attacking Iran on February 28. Two days later, Hezbollah retaliated by launching rockets and drones at Israel.

Israel responded in kind, and on Monday Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz said the military had “launched a ground operation” to eliminate threats and protect residents of northern Israel.

Healthcare facilities in Lebanon are increasingly under attack.

The World Health Organization said on Saturday that 27 attacks on health facilities in Lebanon since March 2 have resulted in 30 deaths and 35 injuries. Lebanon’s Ministry of Health reported additional attacks on Monday, bringing the death toll to 38 and the number of injured to 69, with dozens of ambulances and vehicles destroyed and 13 medical centers bombed.

Doctors, paramedics and nurses were also killed at the center in Borj Qalaouiya, along with Jishi’s father, who served in the civil defense service.

Speaking with the unnatural calmness of someone still shocked to be alive, Jishi described how he rushed to help the victims after the attack.

But the tremendous power of the explosion meant that this was more of a recovery than a rescue mission. Only one person survived, he was seriously injured and remains hospitalized. Everyone else is dead.

Abdullah Nour Al-Din, who heads the Islamic Health Commission’s regional civil defense unit, looks at the rubble of a health center hit by Israeli forces in Borj Qalaouiyah, Lebanon.

(Nebih Bulos / Los Angeles Times)

“The first martyr we found next to the orange vehicle. There were four people where the man was standing. The doctor – God rest his soul, the mattress is still there – was sleeping. My father was in the corridor,” he said, his voice shaking for a moment.

He himself removed Hasan Jishi’s body from the rubble.

“My heart was breaking,” Jishi said. “Of course it was terrible. But I had to do it.”

WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebryesus said the attacks on health facilities were “a tragic development in the escalating crisis in the Middle East” and added in a post on channel X that two health workers had died in another Israeli attack on a nearby village two hours earlier on Friday.

“The intensification of conflicts in Lebanon and the Middle East increases the likelihood of such tragedies occurring,” he wrote.

Israel says its operation in Lebanon is aimed at destroying Hezbollah and that its scope exceeds previous clashes between the country and the Shiite group.

So far, Israeli bombardment has displaced almost a million people (one-sixth of the country’s population) and killed nearly 900 people, including 107 children. According to the Lebanese Ministry of Health, there are more than 2,100 injured.

People pass tents set up along Beirut’s waterfront to provide shelter for people displaced by Israeli airstrikes elsewhere in Lebanon.

(Hassan Ammar / Associated Press)

“Hundreds of thousands of Shiites evacuated and evacuated from their homes in southern Lebanon will not return to their homes in southern Lebanon until the safety of those living in the north is guaranteed,” Katz said.

However, the Lebanese see in the main lines of Israel’s campaign the evacuation, elimination, erasure doctrine that it applies against Hamas in Gaza.

The strategy involves evacuating areas with general evacuation orders, eliminating resistance there, and then wiping out civilian and medical infrastructure to ensure no one returns.

Some fear this is what is planned for the village of Borj Qalaouiya, about seven miles from Lebanon’s southeastern border.

“Why did you shoot [health] centre? What is the purpose of this? Abdullah Nureddin, who heads the regional civil defense unit of the Islamic Health Commission, a Hezbollah-affiliated provider of rescue and emergency medical services, said: “They want to terrorize the medical teams, so we stop providing services to the people staying here.”

He added that the center, which includes a pharmacy, x-ray room, laboratory, emergency room and clinics for dental and medical specialists, serves 20 villages in the region.

He insisted there was no one in the area who could justify targeting and invited journalists to view the vehicles or the wreckage with their own eyes.

Israeli self-propelled howitzer artillery opened fire towards southern Lebanon on Sunday.

(Odd Andersen/AFP/Getty Images)

On Friday, the staff had finished their iftar meal, finished their daily fast for Ramadan, and were getting ready to spend the night. The head of the center was recording a voice note to Nour Al-Din on WhatsApp just before the attack; It never reached me.

“We did not receive any warning,” Nour Al-Din said. “If we had done this, we would have left. We know that Israel does not comply with international conventions on the protection of healthcare workers.”

Hezbollah official Hajj Salman Harb said that Israeli bombardment has destroyed 750 houses so far and 17,000 houses have been partially damaged.

“The massacres committed by this enemy against civilians are to compensate for their failure in the war,” he said.

Jonathan Whittall, the former senior U.N. official in the Occupied Palestinian Territories who now heads the KEYS initiative, a Beirut-based political affairs organization, said attacks on health services are part of Israel’s playbook against Hamas in Gaza.

In that war, Israel was accused of deliberately and systematically destroying the region’s healthcare infrastructure, decommissioning 22 hospitals and killing more than 1,700 healthcare workers, according to Palestinian health officials in Gaza.

Whittall said the “foundation has been laid”, although the scale in Lebanon has not yet reached the level seen in Gaza.

He said Israel’s next step is to “eliminate the means of survival. This includes putting pressure on health facilities and critical civilian infrastructure in general.”

While Israel claimed that Hamas used medical facilities in Gaza for protection purposes, the group denied this accusation. Now the Lebanese are making similar denials.

“Go and look at our vehicles, there is nothing there. Not a single bullet has entered the center since the day it was built. This was a completely medical facility,” said Jishi, adding that there was even a public library and cultural center on the top floor. He drew attention to the burnt books thrown onto the street by the explosion.

“The Israelis don’t need an excuse to shoot us,” he said. “And when they want to justify it, they come up with a million reasons.”

Jishi looked out from where a wall once stood, taking in the green of the hills surrounding Borj Qalaouiyah before his thoughts were interrupted by the thickening smoke.

He said he was not planning a proper funeral for now and could not join his family in mourning the loss of his father, who lives near Beirut. His wife, children, mother and sisters fled the village when the war started.

Israel’s insistence on striking anything or anyone even remotely linked to Hezbollah means that it is viewed as an unacceptable risk by hosts housing the displaced.

“I wanted to be with them, but I wasn’t even allowed to visit. That was the condition,” he said.

In any case, there was little chance of mourning. Ashes burning at the bottom of the building had sparked several fledgling fires, and he took action to extinguish them.

“This is not a time for sadness,” Jishi said.

“I will be sad after the war.”