- TYRE (IPS) - Israeli warplanes
are attacking the Lebanese Red Cross repeatedly, members of the medical
aid group say.
-
- "The night of July 23 we were called to rescue a
family whose home was bombed," Kassem Shaulan, a 28-year-old medic
with the Lebanese Red Cross in Tyre told IPS. "Just as I finished
loading the three injured people in my ambulance, it was struck by a rocket
and all of us were injured."
-
- The ambulance, now parked outside of the Red Cross headquarters
in this coastal city, had a hole through the centre of the red cross painted
on its roof. The inside was heavily damaged and pieces of the metal frame
of the van hung limply, riddled with shrapnel holes.
-
- The Red Cross worker had several wounds on his body,
and stitches on his chin and leg. He said he could not hear very well any
more.
-
- "There was an old man on a stretcher in the ambulance
who lost his leg from the bomb," Shaulan said. "And a child with
us is now in coma. The third person is critically injured."
-
- Shaulan, who has worked with the Red Cross for 13 years,
is also training manager at the headquarters. He said that minutes after
his ambulance was bombed, another ambulance nearby that was collecting
injured people was also bombed.
-
- Nobody seems to feel safe anywhere any more. During the
brief let-up in air strikes after Israel's disastrous strike on a shelter
in Qana that killed at least 60 civilians - more than half of them children
-- villagers are fleeing their homes in southern Lebanon by the tens of
thousands.
-
- The United Nations World Food Programme and other relief
agencies have been working tirelessly to take advantage of the short window
to ferry truckloads of aid to stranded civilians.
-
- The brief halt also revealed more death and destruction.
Members of the Lebanese Red Cross in Tyre told IPS that their rescue workers
retrieved more than 30 bodies from destroyed homes, streets, cars, gardens
and ditches as they began their search. They continued to receive calls
about the dead and injured from villages throughout the south.
-
- Shaulan said his headquarters had received calls from
Qana pleading for rescue assistance at 5 am on the morning of the Israeli
strike. The shelter was bombed at 1 am.
-
- "Immediately after we got the call we took three
ambulances and headed to Qana," he said. "But three bombs nearly
hit our first ambulance, so we turned back."
-
- They attempted to head out to Qana a second time, but
again their ambulances were attacked, and they returned to base. "They
were keeping us away," Shaulan said. They succeeded a third time,
just before 9 am.
-
- "You can see here that everyone the Israelis are
attacking are civilians and the Red Cross," Shaulan said. "And
now we are having trouble reaching villages to collect bodies because they've
bombed most of the roads and bridges before they told people to leave their
homes."
-
- Mohammad Zatar, who has been working for the Lebanese
Red Cross in Tyre since 1993, said he had never before seen attacks on
rescue workers.
-
- "As a Red Cross volunteer I need to be very clear
that we are not political -- we rescue anyone who needs help," the
32-year-old Zatar told IPS. As a colleague unloaded bodies from bloody
stretchers, Zatar said "whether they are civilian, a resistance fighter
or an Israeli soldier, our policy is to help any human who needs help.
But the Israelis seem to be attacking us now."
-
- Zatar said that most of the bodies they were picking
up were of women and children. "Sometimes we pick younger or middle-aged
men, but that is uncommon."
-
- Israeli Defence Minister Amir Peretz told the Israeli
Parliament Monday that Israel plans to "expand and strengthen"
its attack against Hezbollah. "It's forbidden to agree to an immediate
ceasefire," he said.
-
- Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said there would be
no ceasefire, and that Israeli forces will continue fighting from the air
and sea and on the ground in Lebanon.
-
-
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