Lebanon’s first responders say Israeli strikes goal them as they work to save lots of lives

BEIRUT — It’s Jad Deeb’s job to run towards the screams.

Ever since Israel began finishing up airstrikes in southern Beirut in September as a part of its intensified marketing campaign to dismantle Hezbollah, the 31-year-old IT specialist turned paramedic has spent day after day racing towards bombed out buildings to assist pull individuals from the rubble of their properties.

The wreckage from Israeli airstrikes is usually so huge that rescues can take days, at which level few are ever discovered alive.

“We are used to the smell of death,” says Deeb. “We are used to dismembered bodies, we are used to decapitated bodies. We’ve seen the unimaginable.”

The work is harmful. He and his group, all volunteers of the Lebanese Standard Aid Affiliation — a company of roughly 100 first responders who’re largely self-funded, with some modest assist from donors, and no hyperlinks, he says, to Hezbollah — have come throughout unexploded ordnance whereas digging via rubble and have needed to abruptly cease rescues when Israel began airstrikes close by with out warning.

However of all the hazards, Deeb believes getting caught straight in Israel’s crosshairs is the best.

“Of course we’re being targeted,” Deeb says, acutely conscious that he might not return from any name for assist to which he responds. “On numerous occasions when we were doing our job, [the Israeli military] would send us alerts saying: Either you quit the site or we will bomb again.”

NPR requested the Israeli army if it ever threatens to bomb websites in Lebanon the place first responders are actively in search of survivors. It didn’t reply.

Allegations of fighters and weapons inside ambulances

The present battle between Israel and Hezbollah might be traced again to Oct. 8, 2023. That is when Hezbollah renewed its rocket assaults on Israel in solidarity with Hamas in Gaza, a day after the Palestinian militant group led an assault on Israel, killing almost 1,200 individuals there. The following low-grade battle between Israel and Hezbollah became a full-fledged battle in September, when Israel killed the chief of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah, despatched floor troops into Lebanon and expanded its airstrikes.

All through this time, greater than 200 first responders and medical staff have been killed throughout Lebanon, in keeping with the Lebanese Ministry of Well being. Many, like Deeb, imagine Israel’s army is concentrating on them.

In an interview with NPR’s Morning Version, Lebanon’s well being minister, Dr. Firass Abiad, pointed to the way in which many first responders have been killed — “when they were responding to incidents” of airstrikes — as proof of Israeli concentrating on. Human Rights Watch has documented instances from current weeks that it describes as “apparent war crimes” during which Israeli forces “unlawfully struck medical personnel, transports, and facilities” in Lebanon.

Israel had been accused of concentrating on first responders and well being staff earlier than the beginning of this battle in opposition to Hezbollah.

In Gaza, the place Israel has spent the final yr attempting to remove Hamas following its Oct. 7 assault, greater than 500 well being staff have been killed, in keeping with the World Well being Group. A whole bunch extra are in Israeli detention, in keeping with Gaza’s well being ministry.

Throughout Israel’s final battle in opposition to Hezbollah, in 2006, a number of worldwide organizations concluded that Israel focused ambulances in Lebanon clearly marked with Pink Cross or Pink Crescent symbols.

Israel’s army doesn’t deny concentrating on sure emergency autos. In Lebanon, Israel accuses Hezbollah of transporting and hiding fighters and weapons inside ambulances, a tactic the Iran-backed militant group denies utilizing. Israel has accused Hamas of doing the identical in Gaza.

In response to an NPR inquiry asking for proof of Hezbollah’s use of ambulances and medical amenities, Israel’s army stated its “operations have been planned based on extensive intel gathering and in strict accordance with international law,” including that it has “significant knowledge regarding where and how weaponry and infrastructure is hidden, and the forces are responding accordingly.”

The Israeli army’s spokesman for Arab media, Col. Avichay Adraee, posted an animated video on X in late October, exhibiting an armed Hezbollah fighter inside an ambulance filled with weapons, with a message in Arabic urging civilians in Lebanon to not use sure emergency companies. He additionally warned medical groups in opposition to cooperating with Hezbollah and declared that “necessary measures will be taken against any vehicle transporting gunmen, regardless of its type.”

“We wake up screaming”

Deeb works with an eclectic group of volunteer first responders — women and men, largely of their 20s and 30s, from all non secular backgrounds. Many have fled their properties from Lebanon’s south, the place Israel has carried out its most devastating bombardments, and now sleep on the emergency heart in Beirut, the place they’re on name day and night time.

On a current afternoon, throughout a quick lull in airstrikes, Deeb and the others — a former economist, a psychology pupil, a shopkeeper — lounged on the balcony underneath the loud and fixed buzz of an Israeli drone, and shared recurring nightmares with each other: vivid desires of suffocating underneath rubble, visions of fellow first responders killed, our bodies strewn about.

Deeb is haunted by the reminiscence of an aged man he discovered crushed on a sofa the place he’d been resting, and of the mangled our bodies of seven kids — siblings — he found together with their mother and father after their dwelling was hit early one morning.

“You see us rushing with the ambulance with our working faces on, but after all, we are human,” says Deeb.

He and his spouse welcomed their second baby in September, however since transferring into the middle to concentrate on rescue missions, he has seen his new child only a handful of occasions. “We have nightmares. Sometimes we talk when we sleep, sometimes we wake up screaming. Sometimes we share stories with each other and cry.”

When the group is just not speeding to bombed-out buildings in search of indicators of life, they distribute donated meals, water and drugs to displaced households dwelling on the streets, in faculties and in mosques in among the poorer and extra uncared for elements of Beirut.

Whereas a lot of this work is new for Deeb, it additionally feels acquainted. He says he perceives echoes of Gaza — within the mass displacement of greater than 1.2 million Lebanese individuals, within the climbing dying toll, which now tops 3,500 individuals, in keeping with the Lebanese Well being Ministry, and within the rising variety of paramedics and medical staff killed by Israeli airstrikes.

He believes that as a result of Israel’s army has waged its battle in Gaza with impunity for therefore lengthy, it has free rein to use the Gaza mannequin in Lebanon.

“What they did in Gaza, they’re trying to do here,” says Deeb. “All emergency workers, we are a target. We shouldn’t be, but for Israel, everything that is moving is a target.”

First responders assist others whereas worrying about their very own family members

One of many scenes Deeb and his group had been referred to as to lately was throughout the road from the Rafik Hariri College Hospital in southern Beirut. Early within the morning of Oct. 22, an Israeli airstrike destroyed a residential constructing so near the doorway of the medical facility, it blew out its home windows.

“The whole hospital was shaking, patients were screaming, with staff not knowing where to go and what they should do,” says Moustafa Khalife, the Worldwide Committee of the Pink Cross head nurse of the hospital’s trauma unit. “We started receiving casualties immediately.”

The strike got here with no warning, giving civilians no probability to evacuate.

For hours, first responders, together with Deeb’s four-person group, combed via the particles as they heard the faint ringing of cell telephones of victims trapped underneath the rubble. In all, 18 individuals had been killed within the airstrike, together with 4 kids. Sixty others had been transported to the hospital. Deeb’s group didn’t pull anybody out alive that day — they had been solely in a position, he says, to retrieve “half of a dead body.”

All through each search-and-rescue mission and through every meals, water and drugs distribution, Deeb thinks of his family. He usually wonders in the event that they’re certain ultimately to share the identical destiny as these he pulls from the rubble or the households he meets roaming the streets in the hunt for shelter.

“If the war continues, it could be us one day soon,” he says. “Look at what happened in Gaza. We may have the privilege to survive now, but maybe the privilege will be gone soon.”