Appointment with Death in Tyre

The Israeli miscreants threaten to obliterate Tyre as noble hearts stay behind.

From L'Orient-Le Jour

Outside Tyre Public Hospital, Dr. Adib Wazzani, 51, is at work…building coffins.

This war has taught us another skill, says Wazzani. Like everyone else who has refused to abandon the city, Dr. Wazzani must adapt to the Israeli siege. The roads to the south are unusable and those to the north cut by the bombing of the bridges over the Litani River. Evacuation by sea is impossible, even for fishermen.

The flow of victims from the Israeli bombing of local villages and the impossibility of holding traditional funerals has forced doctors to take up the trade of coffin-building.

Last week we made 110, include 34 small coffins for children, said Wazzani, dressed in his green scrubs. Today we have 82 bodies, he says, pointing to a refrigerated truck idling nearby that contains the bodies of 28 civilians, including 16 children, killed in the Israeli bombing of an air raid shelter in Qana on July 30. Together with Dr. Ibrahim Jrady and five Lebanese Army reservists, he is serving as undertaker and government coroner.

We have prepared lists and we number every coffin so that at the end of the war, the remains can be recognized and taken away for reburial in their villages, says Wazzim.

Dr. Ghassan Farran, whose home in Tyre was destroyed, has transformed a room in City Hall into a clinic. We are seeing more and more cases of skin disease and respiratory problems, he says while writing a prescripton for a little girl. It’s due to a bad diet and and the continuing decline in sanitary conditions.

Dr. Farran hasn’t enough drugs for chronic illnesses and heart disease but he been prescribing sedatives for frightened adults, their nerves frayed by the bombings.

Australian Elias Francis, 70, says he stayed behind to remain with his wife and son, who do not have Australian passports. How could I leave, abandoning them here? says Francis. We await the end.