A once humming city, Lebanon’s Tyre is emptied by airstrikes and fear

There are few lights on in the city’s apartment blocks and shops. Restaurants on a commercial strip are boarded up, some with their windows smashed. Packs of dogs roam in places. Garbage sits on corners in huge piles.

The determined include doctors and nurses at the city’s hospitals, and volunteers with the civil defense force. The defiant include elderly residents, some of whom believed “if they are going to die, it does not matter where,” said Hasan Dbouk, the mayor of Tyre.

The desolate scenes in Tyre, Lebanon’s fourth largest city, are a glimpse of what the spread of the war between Israel and Hezbollah could mean for the country, where so many have already fled their homes and are struggling to find somewhere safe.

The war has descended on Lebanon in cruel stages over the past year, from a contained conflict that began when Hezbollah began firing at Israel last October and displaced tens of thousands of people on both sides of the border, to more recent Israeli escalations, including a ground invasion and broad air campaign that Israel says is aimed at ending cross-border attacks.

As its troops try to advance, the Israeli military has issued displacement orders for most of southern Lebanon, including areas to the north, east and south of Tyre. The city’s residents have not yet been ordered to leave, but as Israeli airstrikes steadily spread across the city, that just seems a matter of time.

On Monday, the Israeli military told people to stay away from a large portion of Lebanon’s Mediterranean coastline, stretching from the city of Sidon, north of Tyre, to the border with Israel in the south. Around the time the order was issued, an Israeli airstrike slammed into a building on Tyre’s coastal road, an hour or so after reporters drove by the area and saw the man sitting by the sea.

The bombing sent shrapnel onto the beach, killing Talal Tahla, a barber in his 60s, Dbouk later said.

In a city with a prewar population of more than 125,000, it was unclear how many families remained. A doctor at a local hospital estimated between 40 or 50 families were still in Tyre. There were “very, very few” people remaining in a Christian district of the city, a community leader said.

At the entrance of town, after driving on a mostly deserted highway, visitors are greeted by a large crater in the dirt, surrounded by rubble. Farther into the city, the curtains were drawn on the Comanche Diner, below its slogan: “Just like the old days.”

People milled around the beach road, including boys sitting on the patio of a shuttered Starbucks. Hezbollah banners were hung around the site of a blasted apartment building, including one that read: “Even if you destroy the stone, you will not break our will.”

On a deserted street nearby, a woman wearing a bright-green dress sat next to another abandoned building. “Why am I here? Why are you here,” she demanded, before unleashing a string of epithets directed at Israel and promising the invading army a “surprise.”

The headquarters of the city’s civil defense force was empty, with the door open. As reporters approached the building, a car drove by, honking its horn frantically in a warning not to enter. Last month, Israeli forces had threatened to bomb the headquarters, the head of the civil defense later explained.

If there were pockets of life, they include two of the city’s hospitals, which have been through periods of sustained chaos over the last three weeks and other moments when the doctors were able to take a break.

Monday morning was one of the quieter moments, said Abdul Nasser Farran, a surgeon at the Hiram Hospital who had worked through two previous conflicts with Israel, in 1996 and 2006. He lived in Tyre, but like the rest of the staff, had moved into the hospital. “It is not safe to go out,” he said. “The majority of Tyre is gone.”

The trials for the hospital started in mid-September, when Israel set off booby-trapped pagers used by Hezbollah members, and the wounded arrived at the city’s hospitals all at once.

“We had 200 patients here. In five minutes,” Farran said. As Israel escalated its bombing campaign, beginning on Sept. 23, the hospital started receiving about 40 to 50 patients a day: “women, children, men, young people,” he said.

“The people of Hezbollah, they are not strangers who come from another country,” the doctor said. “They live here.” To kill one member of Hezbollah, the Israeli strikes “killed or injured a lot of civilians,” he said.

A few days earlier, a strike crushed the top two floors of a building close to the hospital’s emergency room entrance. A body was found in the street, Farran said. He did not know if there were other victims. “In this type of strike, there are no injuries,” he said.

The hospital had faced shortages, including fuel. “We can stay four or five days with the gas we have,” he said.

The doctors were slowly leaving, too. The 110-bed hospital had four surgeons at the start of the crisis, then two, and now Farran was alone, he said. They would be fine if the patients came in at reasonable intervals, but not if they “receive two patients at the same time and they both need red triage,” he said, referring to people with severe injuries who could be saved with medical intervention.

Another hospital, Jebel Amar, was well staffed, the hospital’s owner said. But at a third facility, in a heavily bombarded suburb of Tyre, “the majority of the doctors, they left,” Farran said.

The bombing was visible Monday from the Rest House hotel, where journalists have set up camera positions to watch and record the war. Plumes rose from an area behind the white and yellow paddle boats and lifeguard towers on a beach close to the hotel that was full of beachgoers just a few months ago, and from built-up areas in Tyre’s suburbs.

The area hosted at least three Palestinian refugee camps, but most of the people in the camps had “left in search of safety and protection elsewhere,” the U.N. refugee agency for Palestinians said in a statement.

The agency, known as UNRWA, suspended most of its operations in the camps earlier this month because its staff members were also displaced. Those who remained in the camps had dwindling amounts of water, electricity and food, the agency said.

Ali Safieddine, the head of Tyre’s civil defense, said the headquarters received a call, soon after the start of Israel’s bombing campaign last month, from a Danish number warning his workers to flee the building. They argued with the man, but the caller, speaking broken Arabic, was insistent.

Safieddine took the threat seriously. During the 2006 war, his infant daughter Lynn was killed in an Israeli strike on the group’s headquarters. Her face is tattooed on his left arm. His wife was badly injured in the same strike, he said.

The civil defense workers slept on the street for a few days before the Lebanese army offered them space across the street. Even with the region hollowed out, they responded to four or five bombings a day, sometimes as many as 10.

But now, “it’s very, very dangerous,” Safieddine said. His ambulance and firefighting teams waited for a beat — maybe 15, 20 minutes — before responding to the sites of Israeli strikes, in case they were followed by other bombings at the same location. That had occurred “several times,” he said.

He took a call on his cellphone. “We are fine, everything is good,” he told someone, as the afternoon barrage of airstrikes sounded in the distance. Safieddine had not seen his family in more than two weeks, since they fled to Beirut.

The day’s work included a recovery operation at the damaged high-rise building next to the Hiram Hospital emergency room. Days after the strike, someone’s body was still inside.

Dbouk, the mayor, said he had heard some people were returning to the imperiled region, having run out of money for rent in safer areas of the country and tired of relying on charity. He mentioned a family that fled the region and headed to Beirut, only to die in an Israeli airstrike in the capital last week.

“So, no place is safe,” he said.

Mohamad El Chamaa in Beirut contributed to this report.