One Day in Tyre

In one southern Lebanese city, fear and hardship reign as victims fill the hospitals; bodies pile up in the morgue; ambulances are attacked; food, water and fuel supplies run low; and missiles strike the heart of downtown.

TYRE, Southern Lebanon - Entering a home that has been struck by missiles only minutes earlier feels at once both perverse and irresistible.

But when the opportunity loudly presents itself at dusk Monday in the heart of downtown Tyre, curiosity forces me down the rabbit hole, along with a cluster of people from the neighborhood.

The structure itself still feels warm inside. A fine pulverized dust coats everything and still hangs in the air, making it almost seem as if we are diving to a shipwreck hundreds of feet under the sea.

A day of death, sorrow and frustration in Tyre » View

It is a fitting climax for a day that has been one long slow build in a demonstration of war's destructive absurdity. Monday marked the 13th day of fighting between

The southern Lebanese port city of Tyre is reeling from the conflict.

* * *

My day covering Tyre begins with a visit to the city's mass graves site. Here, the bodies lie in thin plywood coffins in a shallow trench marked only by a large stone at one end and a metal pipe at the other.

According to officials at the city coroner's office this is just a temporary resting place (partly a way to meet the immediacy of Islamic burial requirements) until the fighting is over. Then, the bodies will be moved to more dignified burial grounds.

Next to the mass graves is another long trench already dug out and waiting to be filled. Dozens of empty coffins are also stacked in the courtyard of the city morgue. I ask one of the medical examiners if they are for people already killed or for the future.

"The future," she says, with a small sigh.

* * *

For some, the pain of living is now the challenge.

At Najem Hospital, Nohad Zaim and her four children all share a room — and the trauma of surviving an Israeli missile attack. A day earlier, they were fleeing their village of Mansouri with another family when both cars were hit by Israeli missiles.

With casualties mounting and supplies dwindling, Tyre is reeling from conflict. » View

While only one man was injured in the other car, Nohad's entire family became casualties. Both of her teenage sons, Ahmad and Ali, suffered broken bones, facial lacerations and head wounds. Ali may also lose the fingers of his left hand, which is badly damaged. The brothers are in beds next to each other, lying almost perfectly still, moving only their eyes.

In another bed on the far side of the room lies their brother Mahmoud, his face covered with a thick, white, antibiotic salve to treat the third-degree burns that cover his face.

The doctor that has been treating the family says the boy has had to be sedated because he's been hallucinating and having nightmares.

Nohad paces the small space in between her sons, holding her eight-month-old daughter, Mariam. Both mother and child have the red lacerations and speckles associated with blast trauma covering their faces.

The entire family, with the exception of Mariam, too young to understand what has befallen them, is somber. And to deepen the tragedy of their injuries, the boys have not yet learned of one more detail of the incident: their father, Mohammed, was killed in the airstrike.

It's something both their mother and the doctors thought they should be spared for the moment.

* * *

While civilian casualties mount in southern Lebanon so, it seems, does the anger of those directly affected. Outside in the parking lot of the hospital, a silver pickup truck with a shattered windshield pulls in. The driver and several passengers get out, all wearing bandages from earlier injuries.

I'm sitting in my car watching them, but do not attempt to photograph them. In fact, I'm not even touching the cameras slung over my shoulders. The driver looks at me and I can sense his hostility immediately.

"Do not even raise your camera," he threatens. I shrug. One of the other passengers, a man, comes over to the car.

"Did he take a picture?" he demands of my translator, Ali.

"No, I swear to you," Ali replies, and the man walks away.

We look at each other, wondering what had just happened.

* * *

We had heard that a ship was arriving at 11 a.m. with food and supplies for people still in Tyre, so we decide to head to port to watch it being unloaded.

Supplies arrive in Tyre.

It is, we soon discover, a sad and chaotic little footnote in the day's strangeness. A Paris-based group, Premiere Urgence — one of a few international groups, including the Red Cross and International Medical Corps,  courageous enough to work in southern Lebanon — has chartered space for the relief supplies on a German-flagged passenger vessel called the Princess Marissa. The food and supplies were donated by the Swiss government.

But the supplies themselves have been limited because the ship's primary purpose is to pick up what the German government believes will be as many as 1,500 European citizens trying to flee the war zone. According to one official who did not want to be named, the group didn't want to expose evacuees to possible dangers by delaying their departure with the delivery of relief supplies.

Ultimately only about 300 to 400 evacuees show up at the port. The estimated 50,000 people in need in Tyre and the surrounding region are left with a hugely inadequate relief package totaling a few dozen cases of water, some boxes of milk and bags of rice and salt.

Still, it is the only relief the area has received since the crisis began. Francio Dupaquien, emergency officer for Premier Urgence, says Tyre is already a humanitarian disaster.

"It's one of the worst I've seen," he says, while waiting for the ship to enter port. "There is a food crisis, and a health crisis; we're already seeing water-borne diseases within the IDP (internally displaced persons) camps."

* * *

We decide to see the conditions of one of the camps in town, a primary school that is being used to house 150 families who fled their villages further south. Leaders in the camp estimate as many as 1,000 people are living there without regular sources of food, water or medical treatment.

"I've been through four wars, but this seems to be the worst."— Dr. Adib Mazanyi

When we arrive we are immediately swarmed by children, who shout "sura, sura," wanting me to take their picture. These are followed by curious teenage boys, then dozens of angry women.

"They think we're spies for the Israelis and the Americans," Ali, my translator, says to me. "They think we're going to tell them how to target the school."

We try to explain that we just want to see their living conditions, but the crowd grows bigger and more vocal.

"We don't need anything from anyone," says one woman. "Sheik Hussein will provide for us," she says, referring to the spiritual head of Hezbollah, Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah.

We're finally approached by a man with glasses who tells us that they will let us see the camp if we get a paper from Hezbollah vouching for us. We leave without shooting a single photograph or frame of video.

But as a concession, seemingly, a man says he will show us another camp close by. He gets into our car and directs the driver down an alleyway, leading to another converted school being used to shelter IDPs.

* * *

But along the way we pass the city morgue, where there seems to be a lot of activity. We go inside to see workers laying out the bodies of two men on sheets of black plastic.

I ask how they were killed. The first, I'm told, is named Jihad Ammad Murtada and was driving a car that was hit by an Israeli missile.

They unwrap the blanket from around his body to show me that they were not able to find his head. His hands are clenched tightly into fists.

One of the men reaches into the dead man's pockets to pull out his personal belongings -- a set of keys, a wallet — things that would seem normal for someone breathing, but that take on a near mythical quality for someone without a head.

Next to Murtada is the body of Hassan Brahim Said. He had come to the city to buy food and milk for his eight-month-old daughter, Fatme, and was struck by a missile while riding home on his motorbike, according to one of the medical technicians.

They unwrap the blanket covering him as well to reveal that his body has nearly been split in half, bending from the top into a "Y." His face, absent the skull, hangs to one side like a rubber mask. It is a gruesome scene that causes many to turn their faces. Two young boys who snuck into the compound to get a closer look are chased away.

The bodies are wrapped in black plastic then bound with white medical tape in which their names are written with a black marker. For now the bodies are stored in refrigerated truck with the five other bodies recovered today.

Inside the morgue's office, a Lebanese police officer sorts through Said's wallet and other belongings while his brother waits for the items to be turned over to him. The officer opens the wallet and removes some Lebanese currency and slips of paper with different phone numbers written on them.

Said's identification card

In the middle of the wallet's fold, under a plastic sleeve, is a picture of Said's wife, Sabah, who is at the same time beginning to sob at the entrance of the office, perhaps just beginning to realize the sad reality of her new life without a husband and father for her child.

Finally, the officer pulls out Said's identification card. The small square picture reveals what he looked like in life, before the missile strike tore him asunder.

In the morgue's office, exhausted coroners tell me they haven't gone home since the Israeli offensive began eleven days ago.

"I've been through four wars," says Dr. Adib Mazanyi, "but this seems to be the worst. The weapons are more powerful and there are so many civilians being killed."

He says many of the bodies are still in buildings or cars where they were struck because anyone trying to reach them is also targeted. He says that there are reports that even two Red Cross ambulances were attacked the night before, possibly killing both crews.

* * *

This leads us to the Red Cross headquarters near downtown, where orange-jumpsuited paramedics, both male and female, have been racing from one missile attack to the next retrieving the wounded and the dead — at huge risks to themselves.

When we arrive, one of the paramedics, Nadir Joudi, is talking to other journalists, his arm in a sling and a pair of burned stretchers lying against the wall.

He says that two ambulances were out on a run the night before when they were hit by Israeli missiles. They all took shelter in a building, he says, while the aircraft made a second attack.

And adding injury to injury, one of the three injured men that the paramedics had picked up lost both legs in the attack on the ambulance, Joudi says.

Before we can finish the interview, we are shaken by a huge explosion.

The concussion is so strong that we feel it at the Red Cross headquarters almost a half kilometer away.

But strangely, there is no smoke, no fire. In the aftermath there is only the high-pitched buzz of what I've learned to identify as a pilotless aircraft circling overhead.

* * *

Aftermath of a missile strike in downtown Tyre » View

I find the site of the missile strike on a busy street in the heart of downtown Tyre. It's a three-story residential building.

Already a group of young men in their twenties from the neighborhood has been inside and come back out. I go in as well, my camera rolling, wondering if there are victims.

According to the neighbors the house was empty, but inside the natural paradigm of the structure has been turned on its head. The things we think of as solid — ceilings, floors, walls — have been crushed, cracked and fractured like so many eggshells.

Wading through the debris into the living room I look up to see to clean entry holes, the rebar of the overhead concrete pushed into the house and spread out on the downward side like the petals of a daisy.

The floor where they penetrated no longer exists. Furniture is tossed here and there as if the house were struck by an earthquake. Dividing walls no longer divide.

But there is something — maybe several things — strange about this missile attack. The penetration is so deep that it almost appears as if the weapon used was a bunker buster bomb, like those used against the palaces of

Maybe, the thought occurs to me, the house was specifically targeted because of Israeli Defense Force statements about Hezbollah hiding weapons in people's homes. I don't see any signs of that inside, only furniture, televisions, the usual.

Privately, one man in the neighborhood does tell my translator Ali, that a member of a Hezbollah didn't live in that house, but next door; something we couldn't easily verify, if at all.

Another neighbor, a young man, watching the Lebanese soldiers investigate the incident begins to speak with me.

"Who is this war against," says Raed al-Husseini, 20. "Is it against Hezbollah, the Lebanese Army? We don't know. But it's united our people and we won't leave our country. But you must tell Israel and America to stop this. We've adapted to war, but what about our children?"

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