Dazed Refugees Flood Beirut

The frazzled refugees who have flooded Beirut are struggling to find food, water and medicine. They sleep chockablock in city parks, abandoned basements and sweltering schools in the capital.

Traumatized and disoriented, many of them stagger in from the country's south or Beirut's southern suburbs. They are safer here in the capital, but they are also living without clean drinking water, showers or a change of clothes.

"Where will we go now?" asked Ibtesam Srour, 36, who had taken shelter in a Beirut school after her home on Beirut's outskirts was flattened in a missile strike.

Srour's eyes brimmed with tears. Her husband was injured in the attack, as were several other family members.

"We're not getting medicine," she fretted. "They come and ask what we want, write it down and leave."

Tens of thousands of Israelis also have fled their homes, to escape Hezbollah rocket attacks, but they have not suffered the food, water and medical shortages facing the Lebanese.

Lebanon's government has opened the schools of Beirut to the sudden wave of refugees, but many of the shelters are being run by the cadres of Hezbollah, along with a few nongovernmental organizations. Across the city, vignettes of despair play out against a backdrop of playgrounds, blackboards and lunchrooms.

As the afternoon heat presses down, the sour stench of sweaty skin, soiled diapers and dirty clothes fills the classrooms. Babies wail, children scream, adults snap at one another and weep.

An old man and his grandchildren arrived at a crammed schoolhouse near central Beirut with injuries suffered in the air raids, but there was no doctor. An old woman fainted; an ambulance was summoned but it never came. There were no ambulances left to come.

"They came here with the clothes on their backs, and the crisis is deepening every day," said Mazen Ismael, a teacher who volunteered to run one of the shelters on behalf of the family of the late prime minister Rafik Hariri. "The situation has gotten so bad that we're truly afraid of disease."

The country has fallen so deep into chaos that it's almost impossible to know the extent of the humanitarian troubles. Entire neighborhoods have been drained of their residents.