South Lebanon city strains with refugee influx

Sidon (Lebanon), July 27: With a weak, tired voice, Latifah Shehadeh tells how she and her two children ''looked death in the eye'' when they fled their village of Aitaroun in south Lebanon after Israeli air strikes.

''We spent the night at a school in a nearby town hearing explosions close to us, then one missile hit really close and shattered our windows,'' she said as she sat waiting to be sheltered in a school in Sidon, south Lebanon's largest city.

''We lived in horror. Everybody was screaming, crying and praying not to die.'' Shehadeh, a thin veiled woman using a cane to walk, set out on foot the following day, walking for four hours until a passing car carrying other refugees drove them to Sidon. ''I kept urging my children to run and leave me behind because the bombing was heavy and close, but they said We will die with you mother'. I wept a lot,'' she said.

Other villagers said their homes were also destroyed in Aitaroun, where an Israeli raid killed nine people in a house on July 17, five days after Israel launched its attack on Lebanon.

Two weeks into the war that has killed at least 418 people in Lebanon and displaced 750,000, they arrived in a city straining to absorb more than 50,000 refugees.

''The city's population increased about 35 percent in a few days,'' said Abdel-Rahman al-Bizri, head of Sidon's municipality.

''They came at a time when we are having problems securing enough supplies for the residents because of the war,'' he told Reuters.

Repeated Israeli attacks damaged several stretches of the main coastal highway linking the port city with the capital Beirut, turning the 30-minute drive between the two cities into a two-hour trek along narrow, poorly-paved roads.

This, says Bizri, prompted drivers to charge more to carry food and medicine, whose prices have already risen sharply.

''So far we are coping with this because people have been generous with their donations. But if this goes on much longer, we may be in trouble.'' The donations helped the municipality provide more than 40,000 hot meals a day for the refugees, along with medicine for the elderly, he said. At a nearby office, aid workers prepared piles of bread for distribution to refugee centres.

At one centre, a school, dozens of refugees were glued to a television watching news of the war, triggered after Hizbollah captured two Israeli soldiers in a cross-border raid.

Aid workers reported a shortage of mattresses but said donations have been piling up and refugees, who are crammed into classrooms in large numbers, had found ways to keep up morale.

''They formed a football team and a basketball team,'' said Atef al-Ibriq, one of the volunteers. ''They are coping.'' Hussein Fouaani, a 55-year-old English teacher, said Israeli attacks had forced him to flee his home in the border village of Shakra three times in the last 13 years.

''For us who live in the border area, this is not strange any more. This is our fate because we have Israel close by,'' he said.

When Israeli raids damaged his house in 1993 and 1996, Fouaani fled to another flat he owned in Beirut's southern suburb. Now that flat, he says, is also gone after heavy Israeli bombardment on the Hizbollah stronghold.

''My houses are gone but I will rebuild again. This is our land. I won't go anywhere.''

Reuters