At the Epicenter of War, a City of Rubble

Smeared with dirt and covered in flies, the woman sat dazed and stranded in the rubble for days. When she looked up Monday to see people from the outside world approaching through the morning heat, the words tumbled from between her broken teeth.

“God brought you,” said Libi Ibrahim, blinking into the sun. “I didn’t want to die alone. Don’t leave me.”

A drive into the bombravaged town of Bint Jbeil is a voyage into the ugly epicenter of the war between Israel and Hezbollah. A short distance from the Israeli border, this village of rolling hills and olive groves has suffered some of the fiercest fighting of this sudden conflict. Now the town is a wrecked and ghostly place; the days of Israeli shelling and airstrikes laid the town center to waste.

It’s impossible to tell where the streets used to dip and twist through the shops and homes in the heart of downtown; roads have been washed out by wreckage. Mangled buildings form artificial hills, jagged with broken glass, punctuated occasionally by a mosque minaret or a singed palm tree poking lopsided toward the sky. Mosques, shops, homes -- all were hammered.

The weakest, it seemed, were left to endure the attacks: elderly and disabled, shellshocked and starving, they came clambering out of the ruins. Their transistor radios had brought word that Israel had declared a temporary halt to bombardments. Entire families emerged from basements and caves and picked their way carefully through the chunks of rubble, sometimes barefooted.

Ibrahim had been sleeping in a shadowy doorway of charred cinder blocks for six days, she reckoned. She was too confused to explain what she’d done before that. She had been drinking muddy water. She was nearly deaf from the bombings.

A widow, Ibrahim has a grown daughter in Beirut, but had no way to reach the capital. She couldn’t even make it up the street, washed over by tumbled walls, fallen power lines and broken glass. When she tried to walk, she fell down.

“I’m an old woman,” she said. “I get tangled up in the electrical wires and the stones.”

Israel for days warned residents to leave the area before sending in ground troops to take this town, a Hezbollah stronghold and the source of many cross-border rocket salvos. But Hezbollah fighters who apparently had hidden in fortified bunkers ambushed the soldiers, killing eight. After that, Israel switched to a massive rocket and artillery campaign that pulverized broad swaths of the town.

It is impossible to know how many people died in Bint Jbeil. Although at least one body came to light Monday, nobody has begun the job of combing through the rubble for corpses. They have barely begun to claim the village’s living.

Some of them dashed over the piles of rubble, duffel and plastic supermarket bags stuffed with clothes bouncing at their sides, as if they were afraid a bomb might fall before they could escape. Others seemed paralyzed, uncertain of where to go.

Red Cross ambulances reached the edge of the debris, but much of the town could only be navigated on foot. Many of the people stuck here were too feeble and sick to make the walk out. Journalists ended up hoisting them onto their backs and carrying them to the ambulances. One elderly woman was stretched out on a ladder and hauled out.

Unexploded missiles glinted in the sun. Deep bomb craters yawned from the ground. Walls had been demolished until there was almost no shade -- only the enormous sky, a pitiless sun and silence.

A wrinkled woman named Sita Hamayed had propped herself up against a shuttered shop, wild-eyed. Her fingers were coated with clay dust, as if she had been digging.

“We were under the rubble,” she said, as the groaning sound of an Israeli drone filled the village.

“When I hear that plane it scares me,” she said. “God help me. Let them come and take me away.”

At her side, her brother -- a mentally handicapped man with gray hair -- sat cross-legged on the ground, giggling and weeping, his tongue lolling from his mouth.

“Are they going to hit us again today?” she asked.

An old man sat on the hood of an abandoned car that rose from the sea of rubble. His feet dangled, bare and swollen, from beneath his pajama cuffs.

“Our house fell on top of us,” his sister, Roda Bazzi, said dazedly. She squinted from beneath her head scarf, as if she were trying to remember something. She babbled, then fell into silence.

“It’s been days without food or water,” she said in a slow tone that was both apologetic and amazed. “I’m talking and I don’t know what I’m saying. I can’t even walk.”

The only hospital here is swathed in darkness; fuel for the generators ran out over the weekend. The staff has dwindled from 90, including 40 doctors, to five. The only doctor who remained shoved a gurney coated with dust into the lobby, where a thin wash of daylight illuminated a single bottle of iodine.

Nobody bothered to scrub the bloodstains off the floor and counter. Nothing looked -- or smelled -- sterilized. An Israeli bomb had crashed through the roof of the doctors’ sleeping quarters; twisted beams filtered a shaft of sunlight.

“The other day we were sitting here counting the shells,” said the doctor, Fouad Taha. His green eyes look exhausted; he had been wearing the same pair of pants for a week. “In half an hour, we counted 350 bombs.”

Taha has stuck it out here, even though he admitted he could do little more than administer first aid and hope a Red Cross ambulance would come. But on Monday, he said he’d had enough. He’ll evacuate Bint Jbeil today, he said. His family is already in Beirut.

“Without a hospital there is no hope for all these people,” he said. “But there’s not much you can do anymore.”

Refugees were still rushing out of Bint Jbeil, many of them elderly and on foot. They ate fruit and vegetables they found in fields along the way and begged passing cars to take them to the hospital.

Remaining in the ruins was a Hezbollah fighter, who lingered beside the town reservoir. Like most foot soldiers in the Shiite Muslim militia, the 43-year-old schoolteacher refused to give his name. The scratch of a walkie-talkie came from his pants pocket.

“The whole world is crying for Israel to stop, and they don’t care,” he said, turning to point over the hills toward the Israeli border. “Why do I fight? It’s an emergency. You think I like it? I hate it. All the time fighting, fighting, fighting.”

Clad in a plaid shirt and a baseball cap advertising a tire shop, the Hezbollah fighter said that his house had been destroyed for the second time -- the first time, he said, was in 1983.

“The only thing that matters is after the war is over we gather money and buy rockets and buy missiles and buy guns,” he said. “Because nobody in this earth loves us. I can’t believe it. Just because we are Muslims.”

His friend, a fellow Hezbollah fighter, had been “martyred” in the battles, he said. He began to cry as he spoke.

“I wish I were in his place and martyred instead of living this dog’s life,” he said.

“People think we like to fight. They don’t think we want to live with our children and raise them,” he said. “Tomorrow they will come and give us a few dollars and say, ‘OK, let’s forget everything, let it pass.’ But I’ve lost friends. I’ve lost family. You cry for people you lost. You cry for the town. You cry for history.”