In hunt for Hezbollah, Israel is devastating south Lebanon

BORJ QALAOUIYA, Lebanon  — His evening meal done, Ali Jishi, a nurse serving in the health center of this southern Lebanese town, figured it was calm enough to deliver supplies to the civil defense crew down the road.

He was walking back Friday when he watched the Israeli missile lance through the building’s four floors, killing his father and 11 of his colleagues.

“Ten minutes earlier, or 10 seconds later, and I would have been there. It would have got me too,” Jishi said.

Jishi, 35, trudged through the blown-out husk of the building two days after the attack, stepping between chunks of masonry dangling from snarled metal rods, to gaze at the still-smoldering maw where the missile hit.

The blast had churned everything into a gray-colored mulch, from which the occasional object could be discerned: a pamphlet on reproductive health, somewhat pristine-looking strips of pills, the crumpled remains of a desktop computer.

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The Israeli military says the incident in Borj Qalaouiyah is under review. But a day after the strike, the military’s Arabic-language spokesman accused Hezbollah of using ambulances for military purposes.

The latest conflict between Israel and the Iran-backed Shiite group was triggered by the U.S. and Israeli attack on Iran on Feb. 28. Two days later, Hezbollah retaliated by launching rockets and drones on Israel.

Israel responded in kind, and on Monday, Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz said the military had “begun a ground operation” to eliminate threats and protect residents of northern Israel.

Israeli army tanks maneuver along the border with Lebanon on Sunday.

(Odd Andersen / AFP / Getty Images)

Lebanese health facilities have been increasingly under assault.

Since March 2, the World Health Organization said on Saturday, 27 attacks on healthcare sites in Lebanon have resulted in 30 deaths and 35 injuries. Lebanon’s Health Ministry reported additional attacks on Monday, raising the toll to 38 dead and 69 wounded, along with dozens of ambulances and vehicles destroyed and 13 health centers bombed.

At the center in Borj Qalaouiya, doctors, paramedics and nurses were killed along with Jishi’s father, a medic in the civil defense service.

Speaking with the unnatural calm of someone still shocked to be alive, Jishi recounted how he sprinted to help victims after the strike.

But the awesome power of the detonation meant it was more a recovery than a rescue mission. Only one person survived, severely wounded, and remains hospitalized. Everyone else, dead.

Abdullah Nour Al-Din, who heads the regional civil defense unit of the Islamic Health Commission, looks at the rubble of the health center hit by Israeli forces in Borj Qalaouiyah, Lebanon.

(Nabih Bulos / Los Angeles Times)

“The first martyr we found by the orange car. Four were where that guy is standing. The doctor — God have mercy on him, the mattress is still there — he was sleeping. My father was in the corridor,” he said, his voice faltering a moment.

He had pulled the body of Hassan Jishi out of the wreckage himself.

“My heart was tearing apart,” Jishi said. “It was awful of course. But I had to do it.”

The attacks on healthcare facilities marked “a tragic development in the escalating Middle East crisis,” said WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebryesus, who added in a post on X that another Israeli attack on a nearby village two hours earlier on Friday had killed two healthcare workers.

“The intensification of conflict in Lebanon and the broader Middle East increases the likelihood of such tragedies,” he wrote.

Israel says its operation in Lebanon aims to destroy Hezbollah, and its scope has already exceeded previous conflagrations between the nation and the Shiite group.

So far, Israeli bombardment has uprooted almost a million people — one sixth of the country’s population — and left nearly 900 people dead, including 107 children. More than 2,100 more are wounded, according to the Lebanese Health Ministry.

People walk past tents erected along the Beirut waterfront to shelter people displaced by Israeli airstrikes elsewhere in Lebanon.

(Hassan Ammar / Associated Press)

Katz said that “the hundreds of thousands of Shiite residents of southern Lebanon who have been and are being evacuated from their homes will not return to their homes” in south Lebanon “until the security of the residents of the north is guaranteed.”

But Lebanese see in the contours of Israel’s campaign the evacuate, eliminate, erase doctrine it employed against Hamas in Gaza.

The strategy involves emptying out areas with blanket evacuation orders, eliminating resistance there and then erasing civilian and medical infrastructure to make sure no one returns.

Some fear that’s what’s planned for Borj Qalaouiya, a village some seven miles from Lebanon’s southeastern border.

“Why hit the [health] center? What is the purpose of this?” said Abdullah Nour Al-Din, who heads the regional civil defense unit in the Islamic Health Commission, a rescue and emergency medical service provider affiliated with Hezbollah. “They want to terrorize medical teams so we stop providing services for the people who remain here.”

He added the center, which included a pharmacy, X-ray room, lab, ER and clinics for dental and medical specialists, served 20 villages in the area.

There was no one at the site who would have justified the targeting, he insisted, inviting journalists to look into vehicles or in the wreckage to see for themselves.

An Israeli self-propelled howitzer artillery gun fires rounds toward southern Lebanon on Sunday.

(Odd Andersen / AFP / Getty Images)

On Friday, the staff had finished their iftar meal, ending their daily fast for Ramadan, and were bedding down for the night. The center’s chief was recording a voice note to Nour Al-Din on WhatsApp just before the attack; it never came through.

“We didn’t get any warning,” Nour Al-Din said. “If we did, we would have left. We know Israel doesn’t commit to international conventions regarding protection of medical workers.”

A Hezbollah official, Hajj Salman Harb, said Israeli bombardment had so far destroyed 750 housing units and partially damaged 17,000 others.

“The massacres committed by this enemy against civilians are to compensate for their failures in the war,” he said.

The attacks on healthcare services were part of the Israeli playbook against Hamas in Gaza, said Jonathan Whittall, a former senior U.N. official in the Occupied Palestinian Territories who now heads the KEYS initiative, a Beirut-based political affairs organization.

In that war, Israel was accused of deliberate and systematic destruction of the enclave’s health infrastructure, with 22 hospitals put out of service and more than 1,700 medical workers killed, according to Palestinian health authorities in Gaza.

Though the scale in Lebanon has yet to reach anything seen in Gaza, Whittall said, the “groundwork is being laid.”

Israel’s next step, he said, “is to dismantle the means of survival. That includes putting pressure on health facilities and critical civilian infrastructure in general.”

In Gaza, Israel said Hamas used medical facilities as cover, a charge the group denied. Now, Lebanese make similar denials.

“Go look at our vehicles, there’s nothing there. And from the day the center was built till now, not a bullet entered. This was a purely medical facility,” Jishi said, adding that there was even a public library and cultural center on the top floor. He pointed out the singed books the blast had catapulted into the street.

“The Israelis don’t need an excuse to hit us,” he said. “And when they want to justify it, they find a million reasons.”

Jishi looked out from where a wall once stood, taking in the green of the hills surrounding Borj Qalaouiyah before his thoughts were interrupted by the intensifying smoke.

For the moment, he wasn’t planning on a proper funeral, he said, nor could he join family, now living near Beirut, to mourn his father. His wife, children, mother and sisters fled the village when the war started.

Israel’s insistence on striking anything or anyone even remotely linked to Hezbollah means he is viewed as an unacceptable risk by landlords housing the displaced.

“I wanted to be with them, but I’m not allowed to even visit. That was the condition,” he said.

In any case, there was little chance to mourn. The smoldering ashes at the bottom of the building had broken out into a few fledgling fires, and he moved to put them out.

“It’s not the time for sadness,” Jishi said.

“After the war I’ll be sad.”