Holed Up in the South: A Personal Account
This is a personal note I sent out to friends about covering the war for the last two weeks in Lebanon.
Shorter version published in Taft Bulletin: http://www.taftschool.org/alumni/publications/fall06/fall06.pdf
BEIRUT: Friday August 11, 2006
I just got back into Beirut around noon today after a fairly tiring experience down south.
Backtracking a little, into the second week of the war, I was sent down to South Lebanon to cover the crisis. The first few days were spent, in the town of Saida whose population had doubled in ten days with the incoming refugees escaping the war front.
From Saida, my cameraman and I headed down to the town of Tyre.
And one morning, I was woken by the belowing voice of cameraman Vladimir: "Irina, massacre in Qana".
His news woke the whole house which consisted of team from Norwegian Tv, another from Danish TV and ourselves. Shelling or no shelling, we were determined to go to Qana.
Swinging by where the rest of the ABC crew flown in from different offices were staying, we caravaned out through the hills to Qana, the ancient place where Jesus had once turned water into wine.
Upon arriving, local residents pointed us in the right direction. We drove through windy streets over broken glass breaking for the pressure of the bombs. As we neared the site of destruction, we went the rest of the way on foot to the flattened house.
On the way, Red Cross workers and the army were carrying stretchers with children between the ages of 3 and 12, as well as bodies of women.
The site itself was impressive.
Floors of the house had collapsed, and emergency workers where crawling below a slanted piece of concrete, digging through rubble made up of heavy dusty concrete blocks and portruding metal wires pulling out bodies.
The scene was important not only as a record of a human calamity, but also from the perspective of news it was the first piece of reporting which permitted journalists to confirm the reports we had been hearing from refugees.
Regardless of the political lean of the Shaloub family apparently related to high ranking Hezbollah members, the reality is that women and children had been killed in a rocket attack.
As one person explained to me that once born into a Hezbollah family, always a Hezbollah; however, politics does not justify killing family members of any group, especially those which are children.
Once footage and stand ups shot, we headed back to Tyre to wrap up the news of day. The drive back however was not reassuring as artillery thudding into the hills could be heard closer than for comfort level.
The following day with the call of the temporary ceasefire which consisted of brief IDF (Israeli Defense Force) cessation of air strikes, we became more bold and headed to the town of Tibnine, again artillery fire resounding.
This time the image of material destruction unquestionably superceded what we had seen in Qana.
Walking through the deserted city, the center of the old town was flattened, leaving in the middle of the old part a crater that must have been about 15 feet deep.
As the crew marched ahead to film the rubble and shoot some standups with ABC correspondent Wilf Dinnick, I spotted an old lady looking out through a doorway.
Speaking with her quietly and gently, Jamila explained to me that she was alone, her family having fled to Beirut and abroad.
She had decided to stay in her house, about 40 meters away from the center of the bombing. She explained the
noise had been incredibly loud, and sure she was scared but at the end of the day she wasn't leaving.
The question was where was she sleeping? "In the hospital near the southern gateway of the city" she answered back. A light went off in my head, 'hospital?, we should go.'
I alerted the crew of the presence of the lady and the existence of the hospital. Leaving the eerily quiet deserted city, we headed down to the hospital.
The contrast between an empty town to a bustling street was remarkable. And it was bustling but not with the movements of a regular day, but rather busy with refugees who had walked up from Bint Jebel, a town at the heart of the Hezbollah Israeli war.
Exhausted, crying, and stressed, were the voices of the people whose stories we listened to. People had been holed up in houses for 20 days, terrified during the battle taking place between Israelis and Hezbollah.
But exhausted, some explained, like a 16 year old girl whose name I can't remember but who spoke perfect English: " We simply couldn't take it anymore, so we decided to leave".
Most of the people seated around the ledge of two raised gas pumps in the gas station explained that they had made the journey from Bint Jebel over the course of three hours on foot.
There was an old lady sitting facing crying women accompanied by their kids and Sri Lankan maids, sitting legs stretched out straight in front of her, with a solid walking stick lying along the length of her right leg.
As I looked further afield, taking in the scene, I noticed that the area was filled with old ladies, a bandadged father speaking with his veiled wife who explained that she had lost her American passport under the rubble.
Children, women, foreign workers maids, were either wandering around looking for rides up to Beirut, or simply sitting along the street recouping before moving on to refugee centers set up in schools throughout the city.
Feeling boulder and encouraged by the lack of air strikes, we decided to continue making our way down south, to Bint Jebel.
The city was destroyed and quiet. The odd bit of artillery fire could be heard on in the distance. And just over the ridge south of the city was the Isreali border.
While walking through what was once a central market place, you could hear Israeli jets overhead, and the constant buzzing of a mopet like sound of the spy drone, keeping an eye on the media's and any other movement in the region.
The summer breeze would also move pieces of metal signs hanging of of torn apart facades, growning and grinding. Otherwise, you could hear footsteps of the press crunching through the rubble. Finally we saw the magnitude of destruction.
The central part of town will have to raised, bulldozed. And considering the amount of destruction, it would seem like it would take 10 years before the place would look normal again.
By the third day of our travels in the south and east of Tyre, we headed out once more on day two of the arial bombing ceasefire.
This time, this time we went to the town to Srifa, which yet again had suffered the consequences of air raids, partly because
of it loyal connections to Hezbollah.
The rubble having swallowed up other families was crawling with Hezbollah keeping an eye on the press... Once again
the story had changed. It felt like it was more connected to a propaganda war, whereby the press was to record the stories of so called innocent victims which may have been nothing more than fighters launching attacks to the neighborhood the demolition had taken place.
Yes, the houses were destroyed, but no the characters claiming to have sons under the rubble looked too relaxed, too chummy among themselves, and far from being distressed about losing family members. It was an odd place and the story felt more contrived and controlled that what we had bumped into the two previous days.
Without knowing what to make of the atmosphere, noticing its strangeness was also part of the story that makes up the face of war.
All in all, for my first week in the south, it turned out to be interesting journalistically as well as being important in visualizing what war looks like first hand.
By the time I headed back down for a second time, the story was completly different.
Within the first night of being there, at 330 in the morning, I was woken up along as everyone else in our house by the sounds of what we were to learn a day later of a botched IDF commando raid.
The raid keeping all of us up for a long time, listening to machine gun fire, helicopters, airstrikes, APC ammunition being hit sounding more like a strange sequence of fireworks than anything else... all of this taking place at about a kilometer and a half away from where we were staying.
It was dark in the house, and we made sure to keep in that way. I got dressed pretty quickly as everyone else did, and occasionally you could see the silhouette of us or all of us at different times, straining our ears and necks looking out through a window with the night sky as a backdrop.
The raid end around 430/0500, with the sound of Israeli jets schreetching loudly above our heads.
At sunrise, I went off with Norwegian TV to film the damage. It was impressive, and being the first cameras on the scene, we were able to capture the nervousness of the Palestinians living in a camp established in 1948 right next to where the raid took place.
By the end of the morning, the Norwegians were happy to say that there days work was over. They had caught the piece they wanted early. And as the news slowed by the afternoon, so it would for the rest of the week.
It wasn't so much that there was no news to speak off, it was just that the airs raids and explosions in the hills had resumed making the whole southern area off limits to any movements including the UN's and Humanitarian Aid agencies. It was simply too dangerous to go east and south from Tyre which is by the sea.
As we were immobilized, it seeemed that at the same time, the international, and more to the point the American appetite for stories greatly slowed. As interest dwindled, the ability to cover stories in the city became harder.
IDF leaflets dropped from the sky warned people that any movement of bodies at night would be a likely target, and the same for cars, but these were not to move neither day nor night.
The problem of no cars reduced greatly TV networks ability to cover interesting stories, because teams and equipment is bulky, cumbersome and heavy...
As people abided by the rules, and city became quiet. And there is nothing to be said for quiet during time of war. Strangely enough, it always feels more comfortable when you hear bombs in the distance because at least you know something is going on. But when it is quiet, your imagination kicks in, and that is worse than reality.
Then news came that the roads were cut off. No way out of the city. So now the scene is made up on hyper journalists, pinnned down, covering every story possible doable in walking distance, and silence.
Silence bizarely enough is the worst part of war. It leaves you with a feeling of unknown, hence unease. Thoughts turn over repeatedly making you tense. And the tension is increased by the ongoing dismall reports depicting destruction on Al Jazeera, constantly on in the house I was staying in.
Psychological warfare begins and then it becomes a game of keeping yourself calm and busy. And yet being calm is difficult as your body and mind are actually in a constant state of alert even if when it is time to sleep.
After a few days, the decision came from ABC that they wanted to pull me out. But this is not a simple decision, as when working with a network, there are different layers you have to move through before you get a full green light. Then once one plan is installed, everything changes as another decision is made. And lastly, there is the question of saftety.
Any American network has to be extra safe, not only because they value the employees life, but maybe also because it could cost them a lot if something where to happen while not security measures had been taken..
Over the course of 48 hours and indecisions taking place at different levels, being on standby and then relaxing back into
the war zone, to going back on standby was actually pretty exhausting. Probably the most exhausting excercise I have experienced since the begining of the conflict.
Why did we have to wait? Beyond the painful changing of minds taking place at senior levels, we were waiting for the embassy to get the green light from the IDF to clear an hour for safepassage up to the Litani river up 9 kilometers from Tyre.
Mentally those nine kilometers become part of the game of chances or dying versus not. By the end of the 48 hours, I was so ready to leave the place, I would have walked it. I was fed up to be honest especially after dealing with all the mind changes, than the Embassy orders, news of more cars making our drive out into a convoy, and then the contrarian and over virile views
of my local camera crew. Khalas as we say over here, I had had enough, and only had one thing on my mind: Getting to the Litani at any cost!
Finally, on the second day of waiting, speaking with the embassy, we told them we were leaving, and they passed on the information up the line. At the Litani crossing, going over one car at a time over a make shift bridge made up of scrap metal joining up humps of sand in the river, we were in touch with embassy staff explaining they could see our position. Could
they see us through borrowing the eyes of the IDF drone buzzing around over our heads? I don't know, but I would not have been surprised if that was the case.
They could see us, so they could have probably seen us arrive to the make shift bridge to realize that we would be stuck for some time as a old mercedez sadam often used here as communal taxis, was well dug in on one of the sand humps, wheels a spinning around and around.
Looking at the car in front of us, and the efforts made to get it out of its unfortunate position made me laugh. The great escape foiled by red local Merc messing it up for the rest of the gang. But the car got pulled out, the make shift bridge was fixed with the help of about 8 or 9 men working with their pants rolled up wading through water to find ways of stabilizing the metal.
And regardless of my feelings of local engineering, I knew we would make it through, and so we did.
Shorter version published in Taft Bulletin: http://www.taftschool.org/alumni/publications/fall06/fall06.pdf
BEIRUT: Friday August 11, 2006
I just got back into Beirut around noon today after a fairly tiring experience down south.
Backtracking a little, into the second week of the war, I was sent down to South Lebanon to cover the crisis. The first few days were spent, in the town of Saida whose population had doubled in ten days with the incoming refugees escaping the war front.
From Saida, my cameraman and I headed down to the town of Tyre.
And one morning, I was woken by the belowing voice of cameraman Vladimir: "Irina, massacre in Qana".
His news woke the whole house which consisted of team from Norwegian Tv, another from Danish TV and ourselves. Shelling or no shelling, we were determined to go to Qana.
Swinging by where the rest of the ABC crew flown in from different offices were staying, we caravaned out through the hills to Qana, the ancient place where Jesus had once turned water into wine.
Upon arriving, local residents pointed us in the right direction. We drove through windy streets over broken glass breaking for the pressure of the bombs. As we neared the site of destruction, we went the rest of the way on foot to the flattened house.
On the way, Red Cross workers and the army were carrying stretchers with children between the ages of 3 and 12, as well as bodies of women.
The site itself was impressive.
Floors of the house had collapsed, and emergency workers where crawling below a slanted piece of concrete, digging through rubble made up of heavy dusty concrete blocks and portruding metal wires pulling out bodies.
The scene was important not only as a record of a human calamity, but also from the perspective of news it was the first piece of reporting which permitted journalists to confirm the reports we had been hearing from refugees.
Regardless of the political lean of the Shaloub family apparently related to high ranking Hezbollah members, the reality is that women and children had been killed in a rocket attack.
As one person explained to me that once born into a Hezbollah family, always a Hezbollah; however, politics does not justify killing family members of any group, especially those which are children.
Once footage and stand ups shot, we headed back to Tyre to wrap up the news of day. The drive back however was not reassuring as artillery thudding into the hills could be heard closer than for comfort level.
The following day with the call of the temporary ceasefire which consisted of brief IDF (Israeli Defense Force) cessation of air strikes, we became more bold and headed to the town of Tibnine, again artillery fire resounding.
This time the image of material destruction unquestionably superceded what we had seen in Qana.
Walking through the deserted city, the center of the old town was flattened, leaving in the middle of the old part a crater that must have been about 15 feet deep.
As the crew marched ahead to film the rubble and shoot some standups with ABC correspondent Wilf Dinnick, I spotted an old lady looking out through a doorway.
Speaking with her quietly and gently, Jamila explained to me that she was alone, her family having fled to Beirut and abroad.
She had decided to stay in her house, about 40 meters away from the center of the bombing. She explained the
noise had been incredibly loud, and sure she was scared but at the end of the day she wasn't leaving.
The question was where was she sleeping? "In the hospital near the southern gateway of the city" she answered back. A light went off in my head, 'hospital?, we should go.'
I alerted the crew of the presence of the lady and the existence of the hospital. Leaving the eerily quiet deserted city, we headed down to the hospital.
The contrast between an empty town to a bustling street was remarkable. And it was bustling but not with the movements of a regular day, but rather busy with refugees who had walked up from Bint Jebel, a town at the heart of the Hezbollah Israeli war.
Exhausted, crying, and stressed, were the voices of the people whose stories we listened to. People had been holed up in houses for 20 days, terrified during the battle taking place between Israelis and Hezbollah.
But exhausted, some explained, like a 16 year old girl whose name I can't remember but who spoke perfect English: " We simply couldn't take it anymore, so we decided to leave".
Most of the people seated around the ledge of two raised gas pumps in the gas station explained that they had made the journey from Bint Jebel over the course of three hours on foot.
There was an old lady sitting facing crying women accompanied by their kids and Sri Lankan maids, sitting legs stretched out straight in front of her, with a solid walking stick lying along the length of her right leg.
As I looked further afield, taking in the scene, I noticed that the area was filled with old ladies, a bandadged father speaking with his veiled wife who explained that she had lost her American passport under the rubble.
Children, women, foreign workers maids, were either wandering around looking for rides up to Beirut, or simply sitting along the street recouping before moving on to refugee centers set up in schools throughout the city.
Feeling boulder and encouraged by the lack of air strikes, we decided to continue making our way down south, to Bint Jebel.
The city was destroyed and quiet. The odd bit of artillery fire could be heard on in the distance. And just over the ridge south of the city was the Isreali border.
While walking through what was once a central market place, you could hear Israeli jets overhead, and the constant buzzing of a mopet like sound of the spy drone, keeping an eye on the media's and any other movement in the region.
The summer breeze would also move pieces of metal signs hanging of of torn apart facades, growning and grinding. Otherwise, you could hear footsteps of the press crunching through the rubble. Finally we saw the magnitude of destruction.
The central part of town will have to raised, bulldozed. And considering the amount of destruction, it would seem like it would take 10 years before the place would look normal again.
By the third day of our travels in the south and east of Tyre, we headed out once more on day two of the arial bombing ceasefire.
This time, this time we went to the town to Srifa, which yet again had suffered the consequences of air raids, partly because
of it loyal connections to Hezbollah.
The rubble having swallowed up other families was crawling with Hezbollah keeping an eye on the press... Once again
the story had changed. It felt like it was more connected to a propaganda war, whereby the press was to record the stories of so called innocent victims which may have been nothing more than fighters launching attacks to the neighborhood the demolition had taken place.
Yes, the houses were destroyed, but no the characters claiming to have sons under the rubble looked too relaxed, too chummy among themselves, and far from being distressed about losing family members. It was an odd place and the story felt more contrived and controlled that what we had bumped into the two previous days.
Without knowing what to make of the atmosphere, noticing its strangeness was also part of the story that makes up the face of war.
All in all, for my first week in the south, it turned out to be interesting journalistically as well as being important in visualizing what war looks like first hand.
By the time I headed back down for a second time, the story was completly different.
Within the first night of being there, at 330 in the morning, I was woken up along as everyone else in our house by the sounds of what we were to learn a day later of a botched IDF commando raid.
The raid keeping all of us up for a long time, listening to machine gun fire, helicopters, airstrikes, APC ammunition being hit sounding more like a strange sequence of fireworks than anything else... all of this taking place at about a kilometer and a half away from where we were staying.
It was dark in the house, and we made sure to keep in that way. I got dressed pretty quickly as everyone else did, and occasionally you could see the silhouette of us or all of us at different times, straining our ears and necks looking out through a window with the night sky as a backdrop.
The raid end around 430/0500, with the sound of Israeli jets schreetching loudly above our heads.
At sunrise, I went off with Norwegian TV to film the damage. It was impressive, and being the first cameras on the scene, we were able to capture the nervousness of the Palestinians living in a camp established in 1948 right next to where the raid took place.
By the end of the morning, the Norwegians were happy to say that there days work was over. They had caught the piece they wanted early. And as the news slowed by the afternoon, so it would for the rest of the week.
It wasn't so much that there was no news to speak off, it was just that the airs raids and explosions in the hills had resumed making the whole southern area off limits to any movements including the UN's and Humanitarian Aid agencies. It was simply too dangerous to go east and south from Tyre which is by the sea.
As we were immobilized, it seeemed that at the same time, the international, and more to the point the American appetite for stories greatly slowed. As interest dwindled, the ability to cover stories in the city became harder.
IDF leaflets dropped from the sky warned people that any movement of bodies at night would be a likely target, and the same for cars, but these were not to move neither day nor night.
The problem of no cars reduced greatly TV networks ability to cover interesting stories, because teams and equipment is bulky, cumbersome and heavy...
As people abided by the rules, and city became quiet. And there is nothing to be said for quiet during time of war. Strangely enough, it always feels more comfortable when you hear bombs in the distance because at least you know something is going on. But when it is quiet, your imagination kicks in, and that is worse than reality.
Then news came that the roads were cut off. No way out of the city. So now the scene is made up on hyper journalists, pinnned down, covering every story possible doable in walking distance, and silence.
Silence bizarely enough is the worst part of war. It leaves you with a feeling of unknown, hence unease. Thoughts turn over repeatedly making you tense. And the tension is increased by the ongoing dismall reports depicting destruction on Al Jazeera, constantly on in the house I was staying in.
Psychological warfare begins and then it becomes a game of keeping yourself calm and busy. And yet being calm is difficult as your body and mind are actually in a constant state of alert even if when it is time to sleep.
After a few days, the decision came from ABC that they wanted to pull me out. But this is not a simple decision, as when working with a network, there are different layers you have to move through before you get a full green light. Then once one plan is installed, everything changes as another decision is made. And lastly, there is the question of saftety.
Any American network has to be extra safe, not only because they value the employees life, but maybe also because it could cost them a lot if something where to happen while not security measures had been taken..
Over the course of 48 hours and indecisions taking place at different levels, being on standby and then relaxing back into
the war zone, to going back on standby was actually pretty exhausting. Probably the most exhausting excercise I have experienced since the begining of the conflict.
Why did we have to wait? Beyond the painful changing of minds taking place at senior levels, we were waiting for the embassy to get the green light from the IDF to clear an hour for safepassage up to the Litani river up 9 kilometers from Tyre.
Mentally those nine kilometers become part of the game of chances or dying versus not. By the end of the 48 hours, I was so ready to leave the place, I would have walked it. I was fed up to be honest especially after dealing with all the mind changes, than the Embassy orders, news of more cars making our drive out into a convoy, and then the contrarian and over virile views
of my local camera crew. Khalas as we say over here, I had had enough, and only had one thing on my mind: Getting to the Litani at any cost!
Finally, on the second day of waiting, speaking with the embassy, we told them we were leaving, and they passed on the information up the line. At the Litani crossing, going over one car at a time over a make shift bridge made up of scrap metal joining up humps of sand in the river, we were in touch with embassy staff explaining they could see our position. Could
they see us through borrowing the eyes of the IDF drone buzzing around over our heads? I don't know, but I would not have been surprised if that was the case.
They could see us, so they could have probably seen us arrive to the make shift bridge to realize that we would be stuck for some time as a old mercedez sadam often used here as communal taxis, was well dug in on one of the sand humps, wheels a spinning around and around.
Looking at the car in front of us, and the efforts made to get it out of its unfortunate position made me laugh. The great escape foiled by red local Merc messing it up for the rest of the gang. But the car got pulled out, the make shift bridge was fixed with the help of about 8 or 9 men working with their pants rolled up wading through water to find ways of stabilizing the metal.
And regardless of my feelings of local engineering, I knew we would make it through, and so we did.
posted by Irina Prentice at 8:31 AM
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