A Love of the Land Roots Villagers Who Refuse to Flee South Lebanon

For the people of this hamlet of about 30 families, nestled in the hills south of Tyre and about a mile from Israel’s self-declared “security zone,” life during the past week has been moments of intense fear and long hours of anxious waiting.

Israeli shells explode day and night, fired in response to rockets launched by pro-Iranian Hezbollah guerrillas from surrounding fields and orchards into northern Israel. The blasts kick up dirt and smoke and send tremors throughout the villagers’ neat stuccoed homes.

But like thousands of people in the war zone that southern Lebanon has become, 33-year-old Jamal Zabad said he prefers to cling close to home, however dangerous that might be, rather than take his wife and children and expose his family to an uncertain life as a refugee in his own country.

“It’s my village. It’s my people. It’s my house. That’s why I stay,” the 30-year-old stonecutter said with conviction shortly after declining a ride to Tyre with the first U.N. convoy to successfully make its way up the winding country lane to his village since the Israeli reprisals began April 11.

Escorted by machine-gun-toting Irish soldiers in a white U.N. armored personnel carrier, the convoy delivered provisions--including bottled water, canned tuna, powered milk, flat bread and dried beans--earlier this week and then moved on.

The devastating attack Thursday on a U.N. compound in nearby Qana, which killed more than 75 civilians, brought into sharp focus an unhappy fact: Even though Israel had urged residents of southern Lebanon to evacuate the region for their own safety, a significant minority has been unable or unwilling to do so.

The attachment to the land of the rural, mostly Shiite Muslim population in the face of massive bombardment helps explain why civilian casualties have mounted steadily--with scores killed in homes, in cars and even in the U.N. compound--in an area where Israel had hoped to face only Hezbollah guerrillas.

Over the course of nine days, U.N. officials in Lebanon say, more than 15,000 shells have landed in southern Lebanon in response to about 300 missiles launched by the elusive guerrillas into northern Israel.

Bujut al Siyad is typical of the battle zone. Villagers said they have been caught in the middle as the guerrillas’ Katyusha rockets arched overhead, to be answered within minutes by the Israelis’ shells raining down from the south.

Those left here give many reasons for staying: the need to tend to their animals, lack of transportation, their attachment to their homes or the fear of illness, the fear of poverty or hunger if they become refugees.

As a result, although an estimated 400,000 residents of southern Lebanon fled after the Israeli warnings to evacuate, at least 50,000 stayed behind, said Mohammad Obaid, director general at the Information Ministry.

For the past four years, Hezbollah has mounted from these lands what it calls a resistance war to “liberate” the 9-mile-wide buffer zone of Lebanese territory that Israel has occupied since 1985.

But even though the mostly farming area south of the Litani River harbors an unknown number of Hezbollah fighters and many thousands of Hezbollah sympathizers, U.N. officials say the guerrilla fighters are a tiny fraction of the population here.

U.N. spokesman Timur Goksel, who has been with the U.N. mission in southern Lebanon for more than 17 years, said Hezbollah’s hard-core force numbers only 400 to 500 dedicated fighters, with a wider pool of perhaps 5,000 sympathizers ready to take part in local operations from time to time. Besides launching rockets into Israel, the hard-core fighters increasingly have infiltrated the Israeli-occupied zone, attacked soldiers there and then left without a trace, he said.

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As Israel has discovered, these are classic guerrillas, difficult to crush, especially using only artillery or aircraft and no ground forces.

“There is no ‘enemy’ to crush,” Goksel said. “You didn’t see them, did you? They have no bases. They don’t have any pretext of being an army. They don’t have uniforms, and they have local support.”

The guerrillas hide in the fruit groves, launching their rockets from the back of a truck, and then drive on. Or they prop up the weapon between rocks or tree limbs, set the timer and leave the area just before the rocket goes off, Goksel said.

The Israeli response comes in as little as five minutes, but even that is far too late. “By the time the Israeli army bombs the place, he’s long gone already,” Goksel said.

Many in these hills that rise from the Mediterranean, carpeted with grass, cypress trees, citrus and olive groves, vegetable gardens and concrete-block houses, are concerned more with eking out a living than with waging a war. Some residents say they are pawns whose fates are decided by politicians in Syria, which effectively controls the country, and in Israel--and that they simply want a return to peace.

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“I don’t know, and I don’t want to know,” Zabad, the stonecutter, said when asked who was firing Katyusha rockets from the fields around his home.

Where do his sympathies lie? “I believe in everybody. I believe in nobody,” he answered.

Despite the bloodshed, it is common to find people who joined the mass exodus last weekend now having second thoughts as they count the days in Beirut shelters.

Samirah Nabilsi, 33, who is eight months pregnant with her seventh child, was standing in her kitchen making rice for breakfast last Saturday when she heard the shells start to fall near her village of Harouf, northeast of here.

“After the first bomb, I said I wasn’t going anywhere--I wanted to stay,” she recalled Thursday. “But the bombs continued and got louder and louder, and that’s when I started to pack up everything.”

The family hitched a ride in the back of a pickup truck belonging to others fleeing the fighting. Nabilsi bounced in the back all the way to Beirut, where she and her family were deposited at a primary school hastily transformed into a shelter for 150 people.

Sleeping on the floor of a classroom, she said she has regrets. “I really did not want to degrade myself in this way,” she said.

“My land and home is my whole life, and part of my blood,” she said. “But I was afraid for my kids.”