Doctors treating the casualties of Israeli airstrikes in Lebanon have urged world leaders to take action to stop the daily violation of international humanitarian laws.
And British doctors who’ve worked in Gaza have spoken about the horrifying similarities between Israeli tactics inside the Palestinian territory and what’s happening in Lebanon.
Dr Tom Potokar, who was inside Gaza’s European Hospital when it was bombed, told us: “The violation of international humanitarian laws has become normalised.
“Once again we’re seeing attacks on the medical infrastructure, just like we saw in Gaza, but this time in Lebanon. Once again, we’re seeing attacks on hospital staff, ambulance workers and first responders.
Dr Potokar said there was the familiar “condemnation and words from political leaders, yet no action – nothing is done to stop these violations”.
He added: “Hospitals should be places of refuge where you can receive treatment and are protected under international law. Yet they and first responders continue to be subject to attack.”
Hospital staff, ambulance workers and first responders are being attacked, says Dr Potokar
Dr Potokar has travelled to Lebanon to work in the Sidon government hospital, home to the country’s key specialist burns unit which he helped set up through his Interburns charity more than a year ago.
We saw him treating a patient who’d suffered 65% burns in an Israeli airstrike on his home in Nabatieh just over a week ago.
Almost his entire body is swathed in bandages now. It will take months for him to recover. He arrived with two other severe burns victims after their homes in the south were bombed.
Among the team tending to him was another British medic, Dr Anna Joseph, who’s taken time off from her job with the NHS to help Lebanon’s victims.
She told us: “The systematic destruction of healthcare facilities and staff from here and in Gaza has created a huge need.
“People are suffering and dying and the specialists who could help them are being targeted, arrested, denied entry or even killed.”
Damage caused by an Israeli attack in southern Beirut. Pic: Reuters
There was also a young doctor in exile from Gaza. Mohammad Ziara said he sees tragic echoes of what he went through when he was working as a doctor in Al Shifa hospital in Gaza.
“It is obvious what’s happening in Lebanon,” he told us.
“There is an attempt to degrade the medical facilities in order to push people to leave just like they have done in Gaza – and this will have a terrible impact on everyone. And until international law is applied to all parties, this will continue.”
The Israeli military says Hezbollah is hiding among civilian structures and using ambulances to transport military equipment but has provided no evidence.
The Lebanese ministry of health has angrily denied these claims and said it’s an attempt by the Israeli authorities to “justify war crimes”.
‘We lost four hospitals’
British Palestinian doctor Ghassan Abu Sittah, who runs a charity caring for children and has a clinic in Beirut, told us children are suffering as a result of the military tactics.
“When Israel ordered the evacuation of the southern suburbs [of Beirut] we lost four hospitals and one of which has a paediatric intensive care unit, and so the system shrunk because we had no access to these hospitals.
“The ambulances are now afraid to go to the peripheral hospitals and we’ve lost three kids waiting to be transferred.”
He too has worked in Gaza and sees similarities in what’s now happening in Lebanon.
Ghassan Abu Sittah says ambulance crews and afraid and three children have died waiting to be transferred
“What we are seeing is a scorched earth policy,” said the doctor.
“Scorched earth, which means making a place uninhabitable, invariably meaning the destruction of the health system.
“Because in an urban environment this is the social anchor that if you get rid of it, it gets easier to ethnically cleanse people… We saw that in Gaza again and again.”
The fighting between Israeli troops and Hezbollah has dramatically intensified within the past few days.
The IDF insists it’s killing hundreds of Hezbollah fighters and destroying hundreds of its military infrastructure sites: “More than 30 terrorists were eliminated in close-quarters combat and from the air,” an IDF statement said on Thursday.
But Hezbollah seems far from finished, with a statement declaring its fighters had fired a record 80 rockets into northern Israel in a single day.
The constant hum of Israeli jets is ever present in the southern Lebanese towns, punctuated by outgoing Hezbollah rockets being fired.
But there are undoubtedly civilians being killed and injured.
‘Our family used to be four – now it’s three’
Among the burns casualties at the Sidon government hospital is the father of a 15-year-old boy, killed in an Israeli airstrike in the middle of the night whilst they were sleeping in their apartment in central Beirut.
“I have no feelings right now,” Mohammad Kobeissi told us from the hospital.
“Our family used to be four – now it’s three. I have lost my son. He was just 15, What did he do? We are just civilians. Stop the war! Stop this killing.”
Mohammad Kobeissi’s son died as he slept when an airstrike hit their flat
There are a rising number of casualties in the country – with the Lebanese health ministry saying more than 3,000 have been injured and more than 1,000 killed. The ministry does not differentiate between combatants and civilians.
The war has also seen more than a million people flee their homes, most of them in the southern communities bordering Israel, but many also from the southern suburbs of the Beirut.
The Beirut suburb of Dahieh is a Hezbollah stronghold but also densely populated. Many of the victims and survivors insist they have no connection with Hezbollah or any political affiliations.
The Israeli military has embarked on a range of tactics to create what it calls a security “buffer zone”, including blowing up bridges and bombing petrol stations and hitting power plants supplying electricity to entire cities.
It has warned Lebanese residents to leave a huge swathe of the country south of the Litani River.
Several Israeli government officials have declared the intention is for ground troops to occupy this area which makes up about 10% of Lebanese territory.
