By ISABEL DEBRE
SIDON, Lebanon (AP) — Two years ago, Dr. Mohammed Ziara watched Israel Gaza’s health care system, hospitals, striking Ի.
Now Ziara — along with many other medical workers, human rights groups and civilians — warns that the same scenario is unfolding in Lebanon.
Israel is into the southern part of the country in its campaign against the , a powerful militant force and political party that long has exercised de facto control over much of Lebanon’s .
To describe its strategy in this war, the Israeli military has invoked the in Gaza after the Hamas-led . At one point last month, Israeli warplanes even dropped leaflets over Beirut warning that after “great success in Gaza, a new reality is coming to Lebanon, too.”
“I’ve lived this before,” Ziara, a surgeon from Gaza City who specializes in burns, told The Associated Press on Thursday at a government hospital in the Lebanese port city of Sidon.
“I cannot go back to Gaza now,” Ziara said. “But I can be here, in Lebanon.”
As it did in Gaza, Israel accuses Hezbollah of hiding in and operating from civilian areas, and using hospitals and ambulances for military purposes. Israel has increasingly targeted Lebanese first responders and medical centers, forcing several hospitals to evacuate.
“I was besieged in a hospital,” Ziara said of his time at Gaza’s , where he worked before evacuating to Egypt with his family. He then joined the U.K.-based nonprofit Interburns, which sent him to to respond to the outbreak of the previous Israel-Hezbollah war. “I feel what these people feel.”
An Israeli offensive threatens a health system, again
Since the war between Israel and Hezbollah , Israeli airstrikes have killed at least 57 health professionals as of Monday, according to the Lebanese Health Ministry.
Israel has carried out more than 160 attacks against emergency medical workers and ambulances, and forced the closure of six hospitals and 49 health clinics through attacks or threats, the ministry reported. In the latest attack that killed two paramedics and seriously wounded a third early Monday, the ministry accused Israel of deliberately targeting a gathering of first responders on duty.
Ziara and his team from Interburns, which trains medics around the world in burn care, have helped set up the Lebanese public health system’s first specialized burn unit — a critical resource in this where the war has killed 1,461 people and wounded 4,430, according to the ministry. Israel claims to have killed hundreds of Hezbollah operatives in the latest bombardment and .
The Israeli military argues that Hezbollah’s use of medical facilities makes them legitimate military targets . It does not offer evidence to support its claims.
Hezbollah denies conducting militant activities within civilian sites. Although the group’s presence in residential areas is well-documented, there has been no independent verification of its use of hospitals for military purposes.
Based in the first city just north of Israel’s that covers nearly all southern Lebanon, the Sidon Government Emergency Hospital takes more wounded people every day, said Mona Teryaki, the director. “There’s so much demand that we don’t have enough nurses.”
The rising toll of rescue work
Kamal Fakih, 27, hates when people ask him what happened on March 17.
Itap not that it pains him to recall the Israeli airstrike. Itap that he doesn’t remember anything at all. He regained consciousness a day later at the hospital in Sidon, his body burned and cut by shrapnel.
Once stabilized, Fakih tried to connect with the paramedic who pulled him and his friend Hassan from the burning rubble, hoping to hear his account and thank him for saving their lives. But by the time Fakih got his contact, Muhammad Tafili was already dead, killed with a fellow paramedic in an Israeli airstrike on ambulances in the southeastern village of Kfar Tebnit on March 28, according to Lebanon’s Health Ministry.
That same day, Israeli attacks killed seven other medics across four additional villages, the World Health Organization said. Among the dead was a medic targeted while responding to an Israeli airstrike that working for pro-Hezbollah TV channels. Footage of the incident shows two strikes in quick succession — the first hitting journalists in their car, the second crashing into paramedics as they rushed to the rescue.
Israel’s military accused the two medics, and two of the three journalists killed, of being Hezbollah operatives. Its claim alarmed watchdogs that witnessed for killing more than 260 journalists and 1,700 in Gaza, according to figures from the United Nations humanitarian agency.
Although Lebanese and journalists were killed during the with Hezbollah, “this time is different,” said Ramzi Kaiss, the Lebanon researcher at Human Rights Watch.
He pointed to a startling vow by Israeli Defense Minister last week that Israel would flatten all the houses in southern Lebanon to protect its from Hezbollah rockets “in accordance with the model used in Rafah and Beit Hanoun in Gaza” — two cities that Israel almost in its offensive against Hamas.
“There’s a new kind of brazenness in declaring an intent to commit unlawful attacks,” Kaiss said. “It appears that impunity has emboldened the Israeli military.”
Hospitals in the line of fire
Sweeping Israeli in recent weeks have sent over 1 million Lebanese . As the south came under heavy bombardment, clinics shuttered or suspended operations. Nabih Berri Hospital was swamped by an influx of casualties. To make room, it evacuated dozens of patients.
Such transfers involve coordination with the Lebanese army, Health Ministry and U.N. — a game of telephone, doctors say, that creates potentially life-threatening delays. Admitting patients isn’t easy either; the Sidon burn unit must discharge a patient to free up a bed.
But the referrals keep coming, straining a already crippled by .
“The health system is on its knees,” Ziara said, as the hospital was plunged into darkness until backup generators kicked in 10 minutes later, a result of Lebanon’s long-running . “Now front-line hospitals are lacking staff and supplies. They’re overwhelmed.”
Civilians search for answers
Lebanese civilians say that Israeli bombs often come without warning and hit indiscriminately, feeding a growing feeling that Palestinians in Gaza know well — that nowhere is safe.
Mohammad Qubaisi, 53, said his neighborhood of Zuqaq al-Blat in had not received Israeli evacuation guidance before March 18, when Israeli munitions slammed into his seventh-floor apartment.
Carrying his wife from the smoldering ruins, he shouted for his sons. His eldest, Adam, called to him. But he couldn’t hear Jad.
Qubaisi ran back into the skin-searing steam to search for his 15-year-old. When he woke up at the hospital hours later, his face raw with second-degree burns, he knew his son was gone.
The Israeli military said it was targeting Hezbollah. Qubaisi pushed back.
“These are civilian buildings, not military targets. They hit us and we still don’t know why,” he said from the Sidon hospital. “We were sleeping safely in our home, and look what happened to us.”
This story has been updated to correct the name of the hospital in Sidon.
