AS DIRECTOR of the Jabel Amel hospital in Tyre, Ahmad Mrowe is no stranger to the violence that has racked this area for decades.

But as casualties soared and even ambulances and his own hospital were targeted by Israeli warplanes, the doctor said that the latest Israeli onslaught was the worst he had ever seen. “It is incomparable, much worse than anything before,” he said, as he stood in a sweltering corridor packed with relatives of the victims.

A humanitarian disaster is unfolding in southern Lebanon where the Israeli war machine, determined to destroy Hezbollah once and for all, has been pounding the scruffy villages that dot these stony hills and valleys.

It has warned Lebanese civilians to leave the area, and tens of thousands have been streaming north in battered cars, eight, nine or ten to a vehicle, to escape the fighting. But the Israelis have also destroyed the main roads and all the bridges over the Litani river, forcing many of the refugees to abandon their cars and wade across.

Jan Egeland, the UN Emergency Relief Co-ordinator, spoke yesterday of an imminent humanitarian crisis and feared that the destruction of water, sewage and other infrastructure could compound the problem. The UN force in southern Lebanon said it could no longer deliver aid because the Israelis had failed to guarantee its convoys safe passage.

The Israeli offensive has been largely conducted away from the eyes of the foreign media, which have been stuck north of the Litani. To reach Tyre, normally an hour’s drive from Beirut down the coastal highway, required a tortuous and tense five-hour ordeal via the Chouf mountains yesterday. The winding mountain roads were clogged with traffic coming the other way as refugees inched to the relative safety of Beirut, where commandeered schools were overflowing with the displaced.

But beyond the southern market town of Nabatieh, the roads were ominously empty and the skies filled with the roar of Israeli jets and the whine of drones. A nerve-racking half-hour drive along an old road beside the Litani led to a newly built earthen causeway across the river, now the only lifeline connecting the south to the rest of the country.

The Israeli military said that it was hunting down Lebanon’s Hezbollah guerrillas, but it is the civilian population that is bearing the brunt of the conflict. Survivors interviewed by The Times said that Israel was bombing homes, schools, the centres of villages and towns and vehicles including ambulances. Even the Jabel Amel hospital was struck early on Sunday morning by a missile that demolished an entire wing and killed a family of nine.

Dr Mrowe said: “We have recovered five of the bodies. There are another four under the rubble. If they hit the hospital again it will be a massacre.”

By late yesterday his hospital alone had received 196 casualties, 25 of them dead.

One young boy, Walid Abu Zeidi, writhed on his hospital bed, his small body daubed with iodine and his arm wrapped in a bandage. He and his friends had been swimming in the Litani when a missile exploded nearby. “I saw the flash of the missile, then I was thrown down,” he said. In the basement corridors other children sat, wide-eyed with fright, with their mothers and sisters.

Nimr Rmeity, 3, had a bandage wrapped around his head. He was struck by shrapnel on Sunday when a missile blew up a nearby house, killing his uncle and wounding 16 others.

A family from Shaytieh, south of Tyre, sat in numb silence next to each other. “This is Israeli terror, but we will resist,” a headscarfed teenage girl said softly.

Hundreds of foreign tourists who were visiting Tyre’s archaeological ruins are also trapped. “What are the Israelis doing? It is madness. Why isn’t the world doing anything to stop this?” asked Anne-Marie Casales, a French woman on holiday with her teenage daughter and son.

The bombing has generated fear and deep anger that the West has not intervened to halt the bloodshed. “Bush and Blair are breeding future generations of suicide bombers here. You will see. Is it right to destroy a country for just two soldiers?” asked Mustafa Safieddine.

Israeli warplanes renewed attacks on Beirut’s southern suburbs late last night. Strikes also killed at least six people in a southern Lebanon village.

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