“NOW, WE ARE TARGETS”
Beginning on Sep 23, Israel escalated its air raids mainly on Hezbollah strongholds in east and south Lebanon, as well as south Beirut after nearly a year of cross-border exchanges of fire.
A week later, Israel sent in ground troops to southern Lebanon.
More than 150 rescuers, most of them affiliated with Hezbollah and its allies, have been killed in more than a year of clashes, according to health ministry figures from late October.
On Friday morning, rescuers in Douris were still pulling body parts from the rubble, strewn with dozens of paper documents, while Lebanese army troops stood guard near the site.
Civil defence worker Mahmoud Issa was among those searching for friends in the rubble.
“Does it get worse than this kind of strike against rescue teams and medics? We are among the first to … save people. But now, we are targets,” he said.
On Thursday, Lebanon’s health ministry said more than 40 people had been killed in Israeli strikes on the country’s south and east.
The ministry reported two deadly Israeli raids on emergency facilities in less than two hours that day – the one near Baalbek and another on the south that killed four Hezbollah-affiliated paramedics.
The ministry urged the international community to “put an end to these dangerous violations”.
More than 3,400 people have been killed in Lebanon since the clashes began last year, according to the ministry, the majority of them since late September.
