Little Relief

Humanitarian supplies finally begin to trickle into southern Lebanon, but local leaders say they’d rather have peace.

TYRE, Lebanon - Abed al-Muhsen looks like a man under fire, which, if anything, understates his current predicament.

As the President of the Union of Municipalities he is a kind of super-mayor, helping to oversee the governance of cities and villages throughout southern Lebanon.

Small doses of aid » View

Today and every day since the Israeli offensive in south Lebanon began over two weeks ago, he has engaged in an unending cycle of crisis triage in which he must maintain some level of services for the portion of the population that hasn't fled north to escape the fighting.

"The situation is simple," he says, taking a few minutes to speak with me while people swirl in and out of his office like so many gusts of wind. "We don't have anything to eat and we don't have anything to drink and we don't want to eat anything or drink anything. We only want an end to the fighting."

Al-Muhsen says as many as 50,000 have fled the Tyre region, but 20,000 more can't or won't flee, some of them because they're simply too poor.

Roda Kassab, a fisherman, is one of those. He's come with his ten-year-old son, Hussein, to pick up a meager box of relief supplies being distributed by the municipality at an empty building in town.

"Some people are ashamed to come here," says Kassab. "But what can we do? The shops are closed. There's nothing."

He says he was captured by

He says if he could take his family to safety in the north he would, but he just can't afford to pay for the $10 per head many drivers are charging to take people to Beirut, nor could he afford to pay for a place to stay once they got there.

"Why don't they (the Israelis) fight the soldiers," he says, "instead of the civilians?"

The humanitarian situation in Tyre » View

"They're older," he says, smoking a cigarette on the grounds of the Rest House Hotel, a place where IDPs (internally displaced persons) can take temporary refuge before continuing their journey. "They didn't want to leave their homes and I couldn't argue with them."

The Palestinians living in their own section of Tyre, already refugees, don't want to be displaced again in the country that gave them refuge. Despite the sounds of shelling a few kilometers to the south, most of them continue their lives in the Palestinian Quarter as if nothing was happening.

The young men seem especially defiant.

"We're just waiting," says one, who doesn't want to be identified. "If Sheik Hassan (Nasrallah, leader of Hezbollah) calls us, we'll be ready go," he says, referring to the border with Israel where Hezbollah and the Israeli military are engaged in a limited, but fierce, ground fight.

With food, water and fuel supplies in the region running short, so are tempers. Some people are lashing out at foreign media who have come to the region to cover the fighting.

Today, a German freelance photographer was punched repeatedly in the face by a group of men when he tried to photograph the aftermath of an explosion in the city.

Anger at Israel is rising, too. The fighting was sparked by a cross-border raid in which Hezbollah captured two Israeli soldiers and killed several others. But the ferocity of Israel's response took many by surprise, and now many in Lebanon are saying that Israel is targeting civilian homes and vehicles.

Missile strikes on non-military vehicles and structures only fuel that perception. Earlier this week, a pair of ambulances were struck. Six medics were wounded, none seriously, but one of the injured being transported lost a leg in the attack (Watch video of the aftermath.).

An Israeli Defense Forces press officer could not give specific details about the incident, but repeated assertions that the area is used by Hezbollah for military activities, and that Israel has warned against civilian travel in the region.  

One of the medics, Hussein Farhad, 21, says the attack won't stop him from doing his work.

"I went out the very next day," says Farhad. "We're not soldiers, we're not from Hezbollah, we only do our job."

Israeli missiles flattened a seven-story building in Tyre on Wednesday, enraging residents in the area, who said Hezbollah had no presence there. But the target reportedly was the office of Hezbollah's southern Lebanon commander, Sheik Nabil Kaouk.

Some of the frustration for those still left in the south may be beginning to ease somewhat, at least as far as food and water is concerned.

The first U.N. aid shipment arrives in Tyre » View

The

"The importance of this shipment is not what we have," says United Nations spokesman Khaled Manosour. "The importance of this convoy is that it arrived safely. It's the first convoy after we reached a communications system telling each faction — the Israelis and Hezbollah — what we are doing here, when we are leaving, when we are arriving, how many trucks."

Mansour says the convoy brought 90 tons of wheat flour and enough basic medical supplies to take care of 50,000 people for three months. He says the U.N. will also be taking other convoys of relief deeper into the south, even closer to the fighting.

The convoy has already generated a little bit of hope in the area where the supplies are being unloaded.

Sadi Essa, who has fled the fighting further south and is sleeping in a house temporarily abandoned by another family, has come to ask if her two sons, Ali and Hassan, might get jobs unloading the sacks of flour. They aren't needed now, the local coordinator tells her, but there will be more trucks coming later in the week.

Meanwhile, back at the municipality office, Abed al-Muhsen knows his crisis is spinning out of control and that only a political solution, not humanitarian relief, can stop it.

He voices an opinion that is widely shared in Lebanon — that the U.S. is to blame.

"America sells bombs to the Israelis," he says, "so they can drop them here. And tell me, what did (U.S. Secretary of State) Condoleeza Rice do? There is something more important than food and water now, and that is peace."

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