FRAIL men and women, stooped with age, emerge from the ruins stumbling over the rubble that carpets what used to be Bint Jbeil’s high street.

The Israeli concession to suspend air operations in the area for 48 hours has made it possible for the few remaining residents of Bint Jbeil, the largest Shia town in the border district, and neighbouring villages to flee before fighting resumes.

Columns of cars, minibuses and tractors towing wagons filled with civilians waving white sheets grind up the bomb-cratered roads for the relative safety of Tyre on the coast.

Israel was supposed to have captured Bint Jbeil a week ago when troops advanced into the southern outskirts to fight well-entrenched Hezbollah fighters armed with anti-tank missiles.

But this was a battle with no victors. After suffering comparatively high casualties, the Israelis pulled back to the hilltop village of Maroun er-Ras to the southeast, and Hezbollah fighters melted away into the landscape to await the next confrontation, leaving only the elderly and sick to gaze in horror at what has become of their once bustling market town.

“I have been here since the beginning. It has been a nightmare,” says Muhammad Bazzi, 70. His sister Mariam, 76, is too frail to walk or even speak.

Reporters set aside their notebooks and cameras to carry the severely dehydrated woman across the rubble in a blanket. Her long white hair fluffs around her face as she sips from a bottle of water and stares in dazed confusion.

“We were in the basement of our building and it was completely destroyed. I narrowly escaped death,” Mr Bazzi says as he staggers over the debris beside his sister to reach Lebanese Red Cross ambulances. He says they have had no food and lived on instant coffee, powdered milk and water.

Although the outskirts of the town are relatively undamaged, the centre is completely destroyed. The high street is pitted with huge craters. One unexploded bomb with Hebrew markings lies in the middle of the street. Broken medicine bottles, pills and nappies lie scattered over the debris beside a bomb-gutted pharmacy.

The local Lebanese civil defence office has been partially destroyed in an airstrike. A fire engine a few feet from a crater has been reduced to a heap of twisted metal. The facades of buildings are pitted by shrapnel. The small traditional stone houses lining the winding streets in the old quarter are badly damaged or flattened.

This is where the fighting was at its heaviest as Israeli troops pushed towards the centre of town. Furniture, pictures, books, pillows, toys — the ordinary detritus of people’s lives — lie amid the rubble. Dozens of cars are crushed under the debris.

The walls and minaret of a small mosque are pitted with shrapnel from a bomb that left another yawning crater against one wall. Sunlight streams into the mosque through the shell holes in the dome.

Sikni Hammoud, 60, sits barefoot on a stool beside a shop refrigerator filled with bottles of water, chocolate bars and soft drinks. Someone has smashed the glass and helped themselves.

“I want to leave this place anyway I can, but I can’t walk,” she says, raising her hands in despair. She indicates her brother, Khalil, slumped motionless on the ground. “He’s sick,” she says. “He needs his medicines.”

She says that they have spent the past 20 days crammed into a basement with 30 others, many of them children. “We heard shooting and our house was struck with rockets. It was terrible, terrible,” she says. “My brothers and sisters are all in America or Australia. I have no one here to help me.”

Bint Jbeil, a town of about 25,000 residents, has strong links to the US as the population here has a history of emigrating to Dearborn, Michigan, and some to New York.

“Many of the people here are American passport holders and they will find them lying under the rubble in the weeks to come,” says Issam Hijazi, 22, from nearby Tibnine.

Despite the links with the US, there is broad support for Hezbollah. The hospital is run by Hezbollah and named after Saleh Ghandour, who blew himself up in 1995 beside an Israeli army patrol in the town.

There are few Hezbollah men to be seen, however. One plain clothes Hezbollah man clutching a walkie-talkie waves away photographers as he darts through the ruins.

Sayyed Ali Hakim, a cleric in a brown cloak and a small red fez, leans on his walking stick as he stumbles over the chunks of concrete and masonry. He says he is 79 years old according to the Christian calendar, but 81 by the Islamic calendar. He sits down on a shaded pavement to catch his breath.

“This is a disaster. Just because of a certain group of people, why did the Israelis have to destroy everything?” he says. “Israel took its revenge against civilians.”

He adds: “What will it take to get our town back? It has returned to nothing.”

Sayyed Hakim is one of 70 people sheltering in the basement of his old stone house with no sanitation or electricity. “We ate and drank normally at first, but as the fighting lengthened, we began rationing everything,” he says.

The house was destroyed over their heads.

“My cousin is still trapped under the rubble,” he says, asking how she could be saved.

The Red Cross workers bearing stretchers press further into the wasteland while more lines of survivors — limping old men, young women carrying children with clothes stuffed into plastic bags — trickle out from the ruins to the awaiting ambulances.

Laila Dakhlallah, wearing a chador, says that her two children have been killed. “I am going to stand and fight,” she screams. “George Bush is a criminal. I have lost my children and I don’t care if I die. Everything dear to me has been taken away.”

In her shattered sitting room, a framed sign says: “In the name of God, the compassionate, the merciful.”

• Peace rallies, candle-lit memorials, and sporadic protests were held around Beirut yesterday as the city closed down for a day of mourning for the 60 people killed in the southern village of Qana. Shops and offices were shut and flags flew at half mast.

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