AILSA CHANG, HOST:
In Lebanon, Israeli airstrikes today killed at least seven medical and rescue workers. The Lebanese government accuses Israel of targeting Lebanon's already stretched infrastructure. One of the attacks was in central Beirut. NPR's Jane Arraf brings us this report from the site.
JANE ARRAF, BYLINE: After daybreak, a few hours after an Israeli airstrike killed seven emergency responders, the streets were filled with rubble and a growing rage over the attacks at the heart of this Beirut neighborhood. The strike overnight in the Bashura area destroyed a floor of an apartment building used by emergency workers. It killed the head of Hezbollah's civil defense operations in Beirut, along with volunteer medics. Bashura is a poor, mostly Shia neighborhood, densely populated and just a few hundred yards from Lebanon's prime ministry.
This is the street leading up to where the blast was, and there's a small bulldozer that's trying to clear the road of all of the shattered glass and concrete rubble. And people here are still very angry.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: (Shouting in non-English language).
ARRAF: There's a woman shouting from the sidewalk.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: (Shouting in non-English language).
ARRAF: "You, Israel, and you, America, and you, Britain, and you, Arabs who are allied with America and Israel and Britain, I swear, I swear, I swear you will not erase us," she shouts.
She stands near a twisted ambulance parking sign. She holds part of a civil defense uniform shredded by shrapnel. She holds it aloft like a flag. When we talk to her, she says Israel's killing of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah was a rallying call.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: (Shouting in non-English language).
ARRAF: "They thought that we will break because they killed Sayed Hassan?" - she asks. "On the contrary, they made us so much stronger. We are waging a battle now."
The strike destroyed an entire floor of the building housing an office of Hezbollah's Islamic Health Authority. Medical volunteers lean out of what used to be windows, hanging a Lebanese flag and Health Authority banners. Over the years since it was created after Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon, the militant group has built a network of social services in a country where the government has often failed to provide them.
A civil defense volunteer, Kamal Zhour, tells us that he had been with the men who were killed just two hours before the airstrike. He says they all had families here and were part of the neighborhood.
KAMAL ZHOUR: (Non-English language spoken).
ARRAF: Zhour is an accountant, but he has volunteered as a nurse for the past 30 years. He says Israel, with its attacks on health and emergency workers, is creating a second Gaza in Lebanon. Another resident, Hassan Amer, is 82, a retired high-school French teacher. He says he felt the blast when the drone hit and ran out of his nearby apartment where the explosion shattered glass.
HASSAN AMER: (Non-English language spoken).
ARRAF: It's like Israel in the West Bank, he says. Amer has lived in this neighborhood for a decade.
AMER: (Non-English language spoken).
ARRAF: Why are they doing this? To make the Lebanese people weak and submissive, he says. We are civilized, educated people. They're shooting at us from the sky, Amer says, switching to Arabic. In the war in Gaza, Israel has killed medical workers rushing to help the wounded. Lebanon's health minister, Firass Abiad, says Israel is doing the same thing in Lebanon. He said a Lebanese soldier was killed and paramedics injured when Israel targeted a Lebanese Red Cross ambulance near the border on Thursday.
FIRASS ABIAD: (Through interpreter) It is truly tragic that this targeting affects not only unarmed civilians but also those attempting to rescue the wounded. I reiterate. International laws are clear in protecting these healthcare workers.
ARRAF: Lebanese health authorities say almost 2,000 people in Lebanon, including 127 children, have been killed in Israeli airstrikes since the start of the war in Gaza, when Hezbollah began launching attacks across the Lebanese-Israeli border in support of the militant Palestinian group Hamas. Hezbollah has retaliated against the Israeli strikes by attacking mostly Israeli military sites with rockets and missiles. Here in Lebanon, which has been invaded three times before by Israel, the recent wave of Israeli attacks has dramatically widened this conflict.
Jane Arraf, NPR News, Beirut. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
