The rescuers struck at the concrete with jackhammers, excavators and even pickaxes, pausing occasionally and demanding silence, straining to hear anyone still trapped under the collapsed building.
Beneath the rubble, nothing stirred. They resumed, many working through the night after Israel carried out airstrikes on residential buildings across the street from Rafik Hariri university hospital, killing 18 people, including four children, and wounding 60 on Monday night.
“They accuse us of belonging to a culture of death, but it’s not true – we have a culture of life, we are a people who love life. They are the ones who are killing us,” said Qassem Fakih, 39, whose skin was ghost-white from dust after digging for hours trying to find his relatives who lived in the block of flats. Four of his cousins, all children, had been pulled out of the rubble dead, and he was working to find two more family members who were missing.
Rescuers called for a stretcher, they had found a body. A man – Fakih did not know him – was placed in a black bag and carried off to be identified.
Rescuers search for trapped people and bodies after the Israeli airstrike near Rafik Hariri hospital. Photograph: Wael Hamzeh/EPA
The small cluster of buildings on the edge of Dahiyeh, in the southern suburbs of Beirut, was referred to as “the neighbourhood of the neglected”. Its inhabitants were impoverished, some refugees from Syria and Sudan and others Lebanese who eked out an existence on at most a few hundred dollars a month – “enough just to eat and drink,” a resident said as he watched his former home exhumed one concrete block at a time.
A little after 10pm on Monday, Israel dropped a bomb on the neglected neighbourhood without warning. The Israeli military said it had struck a “Hezbollah terrorist target” near the hospital. As rescuers continued to dig, Fakih climbed on top of a ruined structure and emptied out a bag of children’s toys he had found in the rubble, screaming: “Look! Do these look like Hezbollah weapons to you?”
The strike landed just 40 metres from the entrance of Rafik Hariri hospital, the largest public hospital in Lebanon, which, according to the health ministry, sustained “significant damage”.
Dr Fathallah Fattouh, the director of the hospital’s emergency room, said: “When the bombs hit the buildings beside the hospital, they thought it was the hospital itself and there was a great anxiety. Then people started to come from the shelled area, fully covered in white dust, with blood.”
He pulled out a piece of paper that he had been using as a triage list the night before and began to read: “Two children in the red zone – critically injured – five people in the black zone – close to death – most in the green zone, only lightly injured.” When a building collapses, the people inside tend to be killed, he said, while those who survive usually have light wounds from flying debris and shattered glass.
An hour before the strike near Rafik Hariri, Israel had issued a statement claiming Hezbollah was hiding up to half a billion dollars in cash and gold in a bunker under another hospital, al-Sahel, in Dahiyeh. It did not provide evidence but published an animated graphic of what it purported to be an underground bunker.
Women look at the site of an Israeli strike near the Rafik Hariri hospital. Photograph: Yara Nardi/Reuters
The announcement caused a rush at al-Sahel hospital, where staff, fearing Israel would strike, began to evacuate patients.
“The patients were screaming and shouting, there was horror and tears, there was a whole scene. We had around 30 patients and it took us seven hours to evacuate them,” Dr Omar Mneimneh said. The hospital temporarily closed so as not to expose staff and patients to danger of Israeli bombs.
“If this hospital closes, people who are on chemotherapy or dialysis, their lives will be at risk. Other hospitals are already overloaded because they are already full from the patients who left south Lebanon,” said Mneimneh, an emergency medicine physician, adding that al-Sahel had a type of dialysis machine not found elsewhere.
The hospital opened its doors to journalists on Tuesday afternoon in an attempt to refute Israel’s claims that the facility was being used by Hezbollah to store money. Doctors and officers from Lebanese state security watched as journalists inspected hospital beds and a mostly empty underground storage space. Members of Hezbollah stood at the perimeter of the hospital complex, but did not interfere.
Patients receive treatment at the dialysis unit near a broken window at the Rafik Hariri hospital following an overnight Israeli airstrike. Photograph: Sarah el-Deeb/AP
“There are no tunnels, there is no money, no gold for Hezbollah. It’s a private institution, it doesn’t belong to any [party],” said Halimah al-Annan, a nurse and audit team leader who has worked at al-Sahel since 1985.
While journalists were examining the facility, Israel’s military spokesperson published a post on X urging them to inspect a building next door, which he claimed had an entrance to an underground bunker. Journalists went to the underground parking of the building, but found only old boxes and a few cars, plus a locked storage space.
The press could find no evidence of tunnels in the basement of Beirut’s al-Sahel hospital. Photograph: Hassan Ammar/AP
Israel’s claims of tunnels under major hospitals and the strike near Rafik Hariri hospital made Lebanese doctors fear they could suffer the same fate as the medical facilities in Gaza. Israel has repeatedly struck hospitals in Gaza over the past year – which the World Health Organization has condemned as a “systematic dismantling of healthcare” – often claiming Hamas operates in or near them.
Israeli strikes have killed at least 115 healthcare workers in Lebanon in the past year and have forced most hospitals in border areas and Dahiyeh to close.
“The risk is becoming greater even though it’s a humanitarian activity. Things feel more serious now, we are exposed much more to [the risk] of being bombed, to being injured, to dying,” Fattouh said.
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