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Doctors: Israel Targeting Health Care 04/06 06:10
SIDON, Lebanon (AP) -- Two years ago, Dr. Mohammed Ziara watched Israel
ravage Gaza's health care system, shelling hospitals, striking ambulances and
forcing patients to evacuate.
Now Ziara -- along with many other medical workers, human rights groups and
civilians -- warns that the same scenario is unfolding in Lebanon.
Israel is pushing deep into the southern part of the country in its campaign
against the Iran-backed group Hezbollah, a powerful militant force and
political party that long has exercised de facto control over much of Lebanon's
Shiite community.
To describe its strategy in this war, the Israeli military has invoked the
devastation it wrought in Gaza after the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, attacks. At
one point last month, Israeli warplanes even dropped leaflets over Beirut
warning that after "great success in Gaza, a new reality is coming to Lebanon,
too."
"I've lived this before," Ziara, a surgeon from Gaza City who specializes in
burns, told The Associated Press on Thursday at the government hospital in the
Lebanese port city of Sidon.
"I cannot go back to Gaza now," Ziara said. "But I can be here, in Lebanon."
As it did with Hamas in Gaza, Israel accuses Hezbollah of hiding in and
operating from civilian areas, and using hospitals and ambulances for military
purposes. Israel has increasingly targeted Lebanese first responders and
medical centers, forcing several hospitals to evacuate.
"I was besieged in a hospital," Ziara said of his time at Gaza's Shifa
Hospital, where he worked before evacuating to Egypt with his family. He then
joined the U.K.-based nonprofit Interburns, which sent him to Lebanon in 2024
to respond to the outbreak of the previous Israel-Hezbollah war. "I feel what
these people feel."
An Israeli offensive threatens a health system, again
Since the war between Israel and Hezbollah reignited on March 2, Israeli
airstrikes have killed at least 54 health professionals as of Sunday, according
to the Lebanese Health Ministry.
Israel has carried out 152 attacks against emergency medical workers and
ambulances, and forced the closure of six hospitals and 49 health clinics
through attacks or threats, the ministry says.
Ziara and his team from Interburns, which trains medics around the world in
burn care, have set up the Lebanese public health system's first specialized
burn unit -- a critical resource in this crisis-stricken country where the war
has killed 1,461 people and wounded 4,430, according to the ministry. Israel
claims to have killed hundreds of Hezbollah operatives in the latest
bombardment and ground invasion.
The Israeli military argues that Hezbollah's use of medical facilities makes
them legitimate military targets under international law. It does not offer
evidence to support its claims.
Hezbollah denies conducting militant activities within civilian sites.
Although the group's presence in residential areas is well-documented, there
has been no independent verification of its use of hospitals for military
purposes.
Based in the first city just north of Israel's evacuation zone that covers
nearly all southern Lebanon, Sidon Government Hospital takes more wounded
people every day.
The rising toll of rescue work
Kamal Fakih, 27, hates when people ask him what happened on March 17.
It's not that it pains him to recall the Israeli airstrike. It's that he
doesn't remember anything at all. He regained consciousness a day later at the
hospital in Sidon, his body burned and cut by shrapnel.
Once stabilized, Fakih tried to connect with the paramedic who pulled him
and his friend Hassan from the burning rubble, hoping to hear his account and
thank him for saving their lives. But by the time Fakih got his contact,
Muhammad Tafili was already dead, killed with a fellow paramedic in an Israeli
airstrike on ambulances in the southeastern village of Kfar Tebnit on March 28,
according to Lebanon's Health Ministry.
That same day, Israeli attacks killed seven other medics across four
additional villages, the World Health Organization said. Among the dead was a
medic targeted while responding to an Israeli airstrike that killed three
journalists working for pro-Hezbollah TV channels. Footage of the incident
shows two strikes in quick succession -- the first hitting journalists in their
car, the second crashing into paramedics as they rushed to the rescue.
Israel's military accused the two medics, and two of the three journalists
killed, of being Hezbollah operatives. Its claim alarmed watchdogs that
witnessed similar justifications for killing more than 260 journalists and
1,700 health workers in Gaza, according to figures from the United Nations
humanitarian agency.
Although Lebanese medical workers and journalists were killed during the
2024 war with Hezbollah, "this time is different," said Ramzi Kaiss, the
Lebanon researcher at Human Rights Watch.
He pointed to a startling promise by Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz
last week that Israel would flatten all the houses in southern Lebanon to
protect its border towns from Hezbollah rockets "in accordance with the model
used in Rafah and Beit Hanoun in Gaza" -- two cities that Israel almost
entirely razed in its offensive against Hamas.
"There's a new kind of brazenness in declaring an intent to commit unlawful
attacks," Kaiss said. "It appears impunity has emboldened the Israeli military."
Hospitals in the line of fire
Sweeping Israeli evacuation orders in recent weeks have sent over 1 million
Lebanese flocking north. As the south came under heavy bombardment, clinics
shuttered or suspended operations. Nabih Berri Hospital was swamped by an
influx of casualties. To make room, it evacuated dozens of patients.
Such transfers involve coordination with the Lebanese army, Health Ministry
and U.N. peacekeeping force -- a game of telephone, doctors say, that creates
potentially life-threatening delays. Admitting patients isn't easy either; the
Sidon burn unit must discharge a patient to free up a bed.
But the referrals keep coming, straining a health system already crippled by
economic collapse.
"The health system is on its knees," Ziara said, as the hospital was plunged
into darkness until backup generators kicked in 10 minutes later, a result of
Lebanon's long-running electricity crisis. "Now front-line hospitals are
lacking staff and supplies. They're overwhelmed."
Civilians search for answers
Lebanese civilians say that Israeli bombs often come without warning and hit
indiscriminately, feeding a growing feeling that Palestinians in Gaza know well
-- that nowhere is safe.
Mohammad Qubaisi, 53, said his neighborhood of Zuqaq al-Blat in central
Beirut had not received Israeli evacuation guidance before March 18, when
Israeli munitions slammed into his seventh-floor apartment.
Carrying his wife from the smoldering ruins, he shouted for his sons. His
eldest, Adam, called to him. But he couldn't hear Jad.
Qubaisi ran back into the skin-searing steam to search for his 15-year-old.
When he woke up at the hospital hours later, his face raw with second-degree
burns, he knew his son was gone.
The Israeli military said it was targeting Hezbollah. Qubaisi pushed back.
"These are civilian buildings, not military targets. They hit us and we
still don't know why," he said from the Sidon hospital. "We were sleeping
safely in our home, and look what happened to us."
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