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Medical workers, human rights groups and civilians in Lebanon have warned that Israel’s campaign against Hezbollah is following a familiar path—one they say they have already seen in Gaza, where hospitals were shelled, ambulances were hit and patients were forced to evacuate. Two years ago, surgeon Mohammed Ziara watched Israel ravage Gaza’s health care system as an Israeli campaign against Hamas intensified, he said—and he now fears the same kind of assault on medicine is taking hold in Lebanon. The warning comes as Israel pushes deeper into southern Lebanon in its campaign against Hezbollah, which officials and residents say has long exercised de facto influence across much of the country’s Shiite communities.
Ziara, a burns surgeon from Gaza City who has worked with Interburns, said he cannot go back to Gaza but can remain in Lebanon. “I’ve lived this before,” Ziara told The Associated Press on Thursday at a government hospital in the port city of Sidon, where he described what he has been seeing and hearing from colleagues. He added, “I cannot go back to Gaza now,” and said, “But I can be here, in Lebanon.”
In Gaza, Israel faced similar allegations that it was striking hospitals and ambulances while accusing Hamas of operating from civilian areas. In Lebanon, Israel has argued that Hezbollah hides and operates in civilian locations and that it uses hospitals and ambulances for military purposes. Israel’s military has also invoked devastation it wrought in Gaza, and at one point last month Israeli warplanes dropped leaflets over Beirut warning that “after ‘great success in Gaza, a new reality is coming to Lebanon, too.’” The Israeli military says its actions against medical facilities are justified under international law because of Hezbollah’s use of such sites, but it has not offered evidence to support those claims, the AP report said.
Lebanon’s health system workers describe a steady narrowing of options as the conflict continues and as more facilities are forced to reduce or stop services. According to the Lebanese Health Ministry, since the war between Israel and Hezbollah reignited on March 2, Israeli airstrikes have killed at least 57 health professionals as of Monday. The ministry also said Israel 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. In the latest attack described by the ministry, two paramedics were killed and a third was seriously wounded during an incident the ministry said targeted first responders on duty.
Ziara and his team from Interburns have worked to establish Lebanon’s first specialized burn unit, a resource they described as critical in a crisis-stricken country. The AP report said the health system has been hit hard by the war: the ministry cited 1,461 people killed and 4,430 wounded. In Sidon, the scale of the caseload is also visible inside front-line facilities; Mona Teryaki, director of the Sidon Government Emergency Hospital, said there was “so much demand that we don’t have enough nurses.” She described how the hospital, positioned near Lebanon’s evacuation zone, is taking more wounded people each day.
The toll on rescue work is reflected in accounts from medics and paramedics who say they lost colleagues while trying to save people. Kamal Fakih, 27, told the AP that he does not remember what happened on March 17, but later regained consciousness at a hospital in Sidon with burns and cuts from shrapnel. Fakih said he tried to contact the paramedic who pulled him and his friend Hassan from burning rubble, hoping to thank him, but by the time Fakih got the contact, Muhammad Tafili was already dead, killed with another paramedic in an Israeli airstrike on ambulances in Kfar Tebnit on March 28, according to Lebanon’s Health Ministry.
Other medics were killed in subsequent attacks, the AP reported, and it described a separate incident on March 28 in which an Israeli strike hit journalists working for pro-Hezbollah TV channels as paramedics rushed to help. The report said footage showed two strikes in quick succession: the first hitting journalists in their car and the second crashing into paramedics. Israel’s military accused the two medics and two of the three journalists of being Hezbollah operatives, a claim that watchdogs warned echoed justifications they have seen used in Gaza when health workers and journalists were killed, the AP said—citing United Nations humanitarian agency figures that watchdogs referenced for Gaza.
Human rights advocates said the pattern is intensifying as the war reaches more communities, not just front-line areas. “This time is different,” said Ramzi Kaiss, the Lebanon researcher at Human Rights Watch. He pointed to a vow by Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz, who Kaiss said declared Israel would flatten all the houses in southern Lebanon “in accordance with the model used in Rafah and Beit Hanoun in Gaza,” two cities that Israel “almost entirely razed” in its offensive against Hamas, according to the AP report. Kaiss said the comments reflected “a new kind of brazenness in declaring an intent to commit unlawful attacks,” adding that it “appears that impunity has emboldened the Israeli military.”
As casualties rise, the strain on hospitals compounds with the practical difficulty of moving patients when bombings and damage disrupt care. The AP report said sweeping Israeli evacuation orders in recent weeks sent more than 1 million Lebanese fleeing north, forcing clinics to shutter or suspend operations as the south came under heavy bombardment. Nabih Berri Hospital, the report said, was swamped by an influx of casualties and evacuated dozens of patients to make room. Doctors described transfers as involving coordination with the Lebanese army, the Health Ministry and the U.N. peacekeeping force, creating delays that can be life-threatening, and they said hospitals also struggle to keep beds available, with the Sidon burn unit needing to discharge patients to admit new cases.
Ziara described the cumulative pressure inside hospitals and the effect of infrastructure failures. “The health system is on its knees,” he said, as the hospital fell into darkness until backup generators kicked in 10 minutes later, which Ziara linked to Lebanon’s long-running electricity crisis. He said frontline hospitals lacked staff and supplies and were overwhelmed.
Civilians who spoke to the AP also described fear and confusion as they tried to survive attacks and sudden evacuation guidance. Mohammad Qubaisi, 53, said his Zuqaq al-Blat neighborhood in central Beirut had not received evacuation guidance before March 18, when Israeli munitions hit his seventh-floor apartment. Qubaisi described carrying his wife from the ruins while shouting for his sons, with his 15-year-old later missing; when he regained consciousness at the hospital, he said his face was raw with second-degree burns. Qubaisi said he knows the Israeli military claimed it was targeting Hezbollah, but he said, “These are civilian buildings, not military targets. They hit us and we still don’t know why.”
In a final note included with the AP report, the story said it has been updated to correct the name of the hospital in Sidon.
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