Trapped Lebanese flee town during break
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060801/ap_on_re_mi_ea/mideast_fighting_after_the_siegeI haven't seen the sun for 20 days," said 73-year-old Mehdi al-Halim. Next to him, his wife balanced a bag of clothes on her head as she tried to pick her way over the wreckage of bombed-out buildings.
Some 200 Lebanese, many elderly, struggled to safety Monday, ravaged by days in hiding with little food as battling Israeli soldiers and Hezbollah guerrillas brought the town of Bint Jbail down around them.
The siege lifted, they emerged from their shelters, dehydrated, starving — some in their 70s or 80s — and some started to walk out of devastated Bint Jbail. Two died on the road, one of malnutrition, the other of heart failure. Others waited for ambulances.
"All the time I thought of death," said Rima Bazzi, an American who hid with her two daughters, son and mother in a doctor's house. "The bombing never stopped. I didn't go out. I was too afraid. I just thought I would die."
She had left her husband behind in Dearborn, Michigan, to vacation with her children in Bint Jbail.
While she was there, the Israeli offensive began, and bombardment rained around the town and across the south. Then things got worse: Bint Jbail, a Hezbollah stronghold, became the objective in an Israeli ground assault. For eight days, guerrillas and soldiers fought the bloodiest battles of Lebanon's nearly three-week conflict, until the Israelis pulled back over the weekend.
Lebanese woman Dibi Ibrahimi drinks some water after she spent six days without food and water in the southern town of Bint Jbail, Lebanon, site of a weeklong siege by Israeli forces, Monday July 31, 2006. Trapped in Bin Jbail, the epicenter and the scene of the bitterest fighting between Hezbollah and the Israeli forces the old, the infirm, women with children fled from their shattered homes. Buildings were collapsed on to each other, the faces of others were sheared off, fallen power lines crisscrossed the street. (AP Photo/Lefteris Pitarakis)