TWO women, wide-eyed with fear, ran down the path from their simple stone house, clutching small plastic bags filled with belongings. “Are you going to Tyre? Please take us with you,” pleaded one, breaking into tears. “Oh God, help us,” she cried.

Her terror was heightened by the sharp report of Israeli artillery rounds and the thump of exploding shells in the valleys and hills surrounding the village.

In this and other Muslim villages along Lebanon’s southern border with Israel, only a few residents still remain in their homes, mainly the elderly and frail who have nowhere else to go. They have been cut off from the outside world by the fighting. They have almost no food and water. Their telephone and electricity lines have been severed, the cellular network is jammed, and there is no petrol.

The United Nations peacekeeping force, known as Unifil, attempts to dispatch daily armoured convoys to take desperately needed supplies into the battle zone east of their headquarters in the coastal village of Naqoura. But as The Times found at the weekend, it is a perilous journey.

Three white UN-marked trucks flanked by two armoured personnel carriers ground from Naqoura along the narrow border road which winds up a steep brush-covered hillside riddled with Hezbollah dugouts. Although the hillside is within full view of Israeli positions along the border, multiple airstrikes and heavy shelling have not stopped the well-entrenched Hezbollah fighters from using it to fire rockets from there into Israel. Even as the convoy was leaving, two loud bangs and accompanying smoke trails in the blue sky marked the latest rocket barrage from the hill.

The border road lies behind Israel’s front line. No Israeli soldiers were to be seen, but there was ample evidence of their passing in the freshly-churned earth of tank tracks meandering through small fields of green tobacco and the ripped up asphalt of the border road.

There is evidence too of fierce fighting. A burnt-out Merkava tank lay beside the road, its sleek lines blackened and charred, another victim of Hezbollah’s anti-armour missiles. The twin machineguns mounted on the turret were still in place. Beside the tank were broken stretchers and a military bag stuffed with food and covered in dried blood.

The shelling and airstrikes were relentless — puffs of dirty grey smoke blooming briefly among the stony hills. Some of the exploding rounds had set light to the brush, turning swaths of hillside into blackened wasteland.

In Dibil, a hill village of old stone houses and narrow streets, about 500 residents have chosen to stay, a risky decision rooted in a stubborn attachment to their homes and a belief that, being a Christian village, it will be spared the worst of the onslaught directed against Israel’s Shia Hezbollah enemy.

“There’s no Hezbollah here. All we want is to live in peace,” said Father Yussef Nadaf, the tired and unshaven village priest whose white dog collar hung loosely from his neck.

Most of the villagers have gathered in the centre of Dibil, instinctively drawing closer to the stone church with its bright red-tiled roof. Travelling with the Unifil convoy was Nabil Haj, the Archbishop of Tyre, who eschewed body armour for the trip, preferring to rely for protection on his priestly garments and the thick silver crucifix hanging around his neck.

The villagers clustered around the Unifil truck as French soldiers handed down boxes of military rations, enough to feed the residents for a few more days.

Several houses have been destroyed on the outskirts of Dibil and one of the two roads leading into the village has been cratered by an aerial bomb. Niveen Zeeni, 23, said: “We hear the tanks at night going past the village, but we are too scared to look.”

In Jibbayndesperate villagers, aged and stooped, said three people were killed when their house was blown up and begged the Unifil soldiers to recover the bodies so that they could be buried.

With Israeli troops controlling the road at one end of Jibbayn, the only other route to Teir Harfa, the last village on the convoy’s itinerary, was a steep potholed track that dropped into a deep valley. The convoy commander studied a map, but the bad roads were not the only peril in the valley.

The area is a Hezbollah stronghold and a source of Katyusha rocket fire. The commander decided against the trip. “We don’t even know if there’s anyone left in Teir Harfa,” he said, ordering the convoy to return to base. As the convoy left Jibbayn, an old man hobbled out of his home, begging for a lift to safety. The convoy continued. The old man stopped in a cloud of dust left by the last vehicle and cried out: “But I’m the mayor!”

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