Lebanon’s first responders say Israeli strikes target them : NPR

Jad Deeb, a volunteer of the Lebanese Popular Relief Association, prepares school clothes for displaced Lebanese children with one of his colleagues in their office in Beirut, Lebanon.

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BEIRUT — It is Jad Deeb’s job to run toward the screams.

Ever since Israel started carrying out airstrikes in southern Beirut in September as part of its intensified campaign to dismantle Hezbollah, the 31-year-old IT specialist turned paramedic has spent day after day racing toward bombed out buildings to help pull people from the rubble of their homes.

The wreckage from Israeli airstrikes is often so vast that rescues can take days, at which point few are ever found alive.

“We are used to the smell of death,” says Deeb. “We are used to dismembered bodies, we are used to decapitated bodies. We’ve seen the unimaginable.”

The work is dangerous. He and his team, all volunteers of the Lebanese Popular Relief Association — an organization of roughly 100 first responders who are mostly self-funded, with some modest help from donors, and no links, he says, to Hezbollah — have come across unexploded ordnance while digging through rubble and have had to abruptly stop rescues when Israel started airstrikes nearby without warning.

Deeb takes a break from search-and-rescue missions at the emergency center in central Beirut, Lebanon.

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But of all the dangers, Deeb believes getting caught directly in Israel’s crosshairs is the greatest.

“Of course we’re being targeted,” Deeb says, acutely aware that he may not return from any call for help to which he responds. “On numerous occasions when we were doing our job, [the Israeli military] would send us alerts saying: Either you quit the site or we will bomb again.”

NPR asked the Israeli military if it ever threatens to bomb sites in Lebanon where first responders are actively looking for survivors. It did not respond.

Allegations of fighters and weapons inside ambulances

The current war between Israel and Hezbollah can be traced back to Oct. 8, 2023. That’s when Hezbollah renewed its rocket attacks on Israel in solidarity with Hamas in Gaza, a day after the Palestinian militant group led an attack on Israel, killing nearly 1,200 people there. The ensuing low-grade conflict between Israel and Hezbollah turned into a full-fledged war in September, when Israel killed the leader of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah, sent ground troops into Lebanon and expanded its airstrikes.

Throughout this time, more than 200 first responders and medical workers have been killed across Lebanon, according to the Lebanese Ministry of Health. Many, like Deeb, believe Israel’s military is targeting them.

In an interview with NPR’s Morning Edition, Lebanon’s health minister, Dr. Firass Abiad, pointed to the way many first responders have been killed — “when they were responding to incidents” of airstrikes — as evidence of Israeli targeting. Human Rights Watch has documented cases from recent weeks that it describes as “apparent war crimes” in which Israeli forces “unlawfully struck medical personnel, transports, and facilities” in Lebanon.

Jad Deeb, center, and other first responder volunteers talk on the balcony of their office in Beirut. One of his colleagues affixes a patch to Deeb’s shirt, indicating his blood type.

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As part of ongoing community support efforts, Deeb collects donations from his colleagues at their office.

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Israel had been accused of targeting first responders and health workers before the start of this war against Hezbollah.

In Gaza, where Israel has spent the last year trying to eliminate Hamas following its Oct. 7 attack, more than 500 health workers have been killed, according to the World Health Organization. Hundreds more are in Israeli detention, according to Gaza’s health ministry.

During Israel’s last war against Hezbollah, in 2006, several international organizations concluded that Israel targeted ambulances in Lebanon clearly marked with Red Cross or Red Crescent symbols.

Israel’s military does not deny targeting certain emergency vehicles. In Lebanon, Israel accuses Hezbollah of transporting and hiding fighters and weapons inside ambulances, a tactic the Iran-backed militant group denies using. Israel has accused Hamas of doing the same in Gaza.

Search-and-rescue teams carry a body recovered from the rubble at the site of an Israeli strike in a central Beirut neighborhood, Nov. 23.

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In response to an NPR inquiry asking for evidence of Hezbollah’s use of ambulances and medical facilities, Israel’s military said its “operations have been planned based on extensive intel gathering and in strict accordance with international law,” adding that it has “significant knowledge regarding where and how weaponry and infrastructure is hidden, and the forces are responding accordingly.”

The Israeli military’s spokesman for Arab media, Col. Avichay Adraee, posted an animated video on X in late October, showing an armed Hezbollah fighter inside an ambulance full of weapons, with a message in Arabic urging civilians in Lebanon not to use certain emergency services. He also warned medical teams against cooperating with Hezbollah and declared that “necessary measures will be taken against any vehicle transporting gunmen, regardless of its type.”

“We wake up screaming”

Deeb works with an eclectic group of volunteer first responders — men and women, mostly in their 20s and 30s, from all religious backgrounds. Many have fled their homes from Lebanon’s south, where Israel has carried out its most devastating bombardments, and now sleep at the emergency center in Beirut, where they are on call day and night.

On a recent afternoon, during a brief lull in airstrikes, Deeb and the others — a former economist, a psychology student, a shopkeeper — lounged on the balcony under the loud and constant buzz of an Israeli drone, and shared recurring nightmares with one another: vivid dreams of suffocating under rubble, visions of fellow first responders killed, bodies strewn about.

Search-and-rescue volunteers of the Lebanese Popular Relief Association sit on the balcony of their office and check the news on their phones in Beirut.

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A volunteer gestures at colleagues while another volunteer sleeps behind him. Many sleep at the emergency center, where they are on call day and night. They have had to flee their homes in areas where Israel carried out its heaviest bombardments.

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Deeb is haunted by the memory of an elderly man he found crushed on a couch where he’d been resting, and of the mangled bodies of seven children — siblings — he discovered along with their parents after their home was hit early one morning.

“You see us rushing with the ambulance with our working faces on, but after all, we are human,” says Deeb.

He and his wife welcomed their second child in September, but since moving into the center to focus on rescue missions, he has seen his newborn just a handful of times. “We have nightmares. Sometimes we talk when we sleep, sometimes we wake up screaming. Sometimes we share stories with each other and cry.”

When the team is not rushing to bombed-out buildings looking for signs of life, they distribute donated food, water and medicine to displaced families living on the streets, in schools and in mosques in some of the poorer and more neglected parts of Beirut.

First responders distribute donated water, food and medicine to displaced families in Beirut.

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While much of this work is new for Deeb, it also feels familiar. He says he perceives echoes of Gaza — in the mass displacement of more than 1.2 million Lebanese people, in the climbing death toll, which now tops 3,500 people, according to the Lebanese Health Ministry, and in the growing number of paramedics and medical workers killed by Israeli airstrikes.

He believes that because Israel’s military has waged its war in Gaza with impunity for so long, it has free rein to apply the Gaza model in Lebanon.

“What they did in Gaza, they’re trying to do here,” says Deeb. “All emergency workers, we are a target. We shouldn’t be, but for Israel, everything that is moving is a target.”

First responders help others while worrying about their own loved ones

One of the scenes Deeb and his team were called to recently was across the street from the Rafik Hariri University Hospital in southern Beirut. Early in the morning of Oct. 22, an Israeli airstrike destroyed a residential building so close to the entrance of the medical facility, it blew out its windows.

“The whole hospital was shaking, patients were screaming, with staff not knowing where to go and what they should do,” says Moustafa Khalife, the International Committee of the Red Cross head nurse of the hospital’s trauma unit. “We started receiving casualties immediately.”

Civil defense members search for survivors at the site of an Israeli strike near Rafik Hariri University Hospital in Beirut, Oct. 22.

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A firefighter stands at the site of an Israeli airstrike near Rafik Hariri University Hospital. In all, 18 people were killed in that attack, including children.

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The strike came with no warning, giving civilians no chance to evacuate.

For hours, first responders, including Deeb’s four-person team, combed through the debris as they heard the faint ringing of cell phones of victims trapped under the rubble. In all, 18 people were killed in the airstrike, including four children. Sixty others were transported to the hospital. Deeb’s team did not pull anyone out alive that day — they were only able, he says, to retrieve “half of a dead body.”

During a brief lull in airstrikes, Deeb takes a break at the emergency center in Beirut. “We’ve seen the unimaginable,” he says.

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Throughout every search-and-rescue mission and during each food, water and medicine distribution, Deeb thinks of his own family. He often wonders if they’re bound eventually to share the same fate as those he pulls from the rubble or the families he meets roaming the streets in search of shelter.

“If the war continues, it could be us one day soon,” he says. “Look at what happened in Gaza. We may have the privilege to survive now, but maybe the privilege will be gone soon.”