An ambulance every minute. Even the large hospital at the American University of Beirut has become too small to handle so many wounded. After thousands of beeps rang out Tuesday afternoon, this emergency clinic and others in the Lebanese capital had to make way for Nearly 3,000 injuredThe majority, originally from Dahie, a southern suburb of the Shiite majority where the leaders of the Hezbollah in the city.
“They just crossed all the boundaries. Yeah [los israelíes] “They’re coming in, it’s the beginning of the end,” Tony, the Christian owner of a cafeteria near the polyclinic, said in amazement just an hour after the attack. With the first cohort of ambulances, he left his post and ran to show the paramedics a shortcut to the entrance.
The American university hospital immediately becomes a hive of hysteria. Close friends of Hezbollah militants gather there, but also hundreds, even thousands! civilians victims of explosions while they were clearing the table, going home or picking pears at the fruit store. Among them was nine-year-old Fatima Yaafar. At least eight other people have died like Fatima, according to the Lebanese Health Ministry.
At the emergency exit, the crowd gathers impatiently around the ambulances. Hezbollah has not yet accused Israel of being behind the attack, but it is clear. Behind their desperation to find their wounded daughter or father is the sigh of someone who knows that this failure is another chapter in a war with their southern neighbor that neither begins nor ends. A chapter that has proven particularly dangerous because it first mass cyberattack which the Lebanese are facing.
In the crowded space cordoned off by the Lebanese army, a man presents the journalist with a brief: “Now let the terrorists speak.”
Inside, in the hospital lobby, a crowd of black abayas peers out the window. Some women cry, others shiver, and others lash out at a receptionist who can’t cope. Others simply wait. At 6:41 p.m., as night falls, several men come in and spread out their mats for the Friday prayer. Maghrebian.
The lobby of the American Hospital of Beirut thus becomes an improvised mosque for some, while the arrival of new wounded and the screams of the receptionist fuel the frenzy.
It is night and ambulances are jamming the roads of Beirut. The city’s major hospitals are scattered: in addition to the American one, in Hamra (west), the Hôtel-Dieu de France in Achrafie (east) and the Bahman, near Dahie, receive the majority of patients.
At the Lebanese hospital in the Christian quarter of Yeitawi, about thirty specialists run through the corridors to treat six wounded. Three men share a room, and Each of them has five health workers who treat their burns. torso, their faces bruised and their lips split. A nun comforts the Shiite women in the waiting room.
A national blood donation campaign was launched from northern Tripoli to the southern city of Tyre, also hit by the attack. This Tuesday was the third in Beirut since the start of the war in Gaza on October 7.
In January, the Israel Defense Forces killed Hamas deputy leader Saleh al-Arouri. Last July, another Israeli airstrike killed Hezbollah commander Fuad Shukr and four civilians in the Haret Hreik neighborhood. However, Tuesday’s explosion of thousands of “buses” in the space of thirty minutes was the bloodiest blow to the Lebanese capital in the eleven months of war.
Although Tel Aviv has not claimed responsibility for the attack.Hezbollah blamed Israel and vowed to retaliate “as just punishment” for the attack. Lebanon’s information minister also called the explosion of the devices Tuesday afternoon an “Israeli aggression.”
