BEIRUT — I’ve been back in Beirut for a few days now and I’m real­iz­ing just how dif­fi­cult this war has been to cover from a jour­nal­is­tic stand­point. Thanks to the seem­ingly ran­dom nature of air-strikes (yes, I know they’re not _really_ ran­dom) and the secre­tive nature of Hezbol­lah, get­ting close to the action has been exceed­ingly dif­fi­cult. Hezbol­lah doesn’t allow reporters to tag along with them and get­ting to close to the receiv­ing end of an Israeli artillery bar­rage is ill-advised. So it’s dif­fi­cult to say what is really going on mil­i­tar­ily. Per­haps some of the reporters who are embed­ded with the IDF can say, assum­ing the mil­i­tary cen­sors let enough stuff through.
Any­way, in Beirut, the sit­u­a­tion is grow­ing dire. Accord­ing to Nabil el-Jisr, coor­di­na­tor for the Higher Relief Com­mis­sion, Lebanon’s power plants have cut down on pro­duc­tion in order to stretch out the fuel left in the coun­try, but most esti­mates gives us about a week of diesel fuel for gen­er­a­tors and about the same for gaso­line sup­plies, even with rationing. Three-hour waits in lines get you 10 liters of gaso­line these days. I stu­pidly rented a car after hav­ing no end of trou­bles with hir­ing dri­vers, but now I just mainly leave it parked in an attempt to save fuel.
There are almost 1 mil­lion peo­ple dis­placed, and no one has any real idea of where they are or what’s going to hap­pen to them. El-Jisr said yes­ter­day that about 250,000 were out­side the coun­try, but that still leaves 700,000 or so liv­ing in schools, shel­ters, parks or pri­vate homes of gen­er­ous Lebanese. How long will they stay? Where will they go after the fight­ing stops? (A num­ber of vil­lages in the south are gone, sim­ply wiped off the map, or with a high per­cent­age of ruined houses.) So far, no one has any answers.
Fur­ther com­pli­cat­ing mat­ters is the cul­tural clash. Most of the dis­placed now squat­ting in var­i­ous Beirut locales are poor, tra­di­tional Shi’ites. (Some Chris­tians, too, but not many.) There’s a grow­ing ten­sion between Sun­nis and Shi’ites, and I encoun­tered grow­ing resent­ment  — and out­right clas­sism — among Sun­nis toward the Shi’ites. If this keeps up, Sun­nis and Chris­tians will be blam­ing “the Shi’ites” instead of Hezbol­lah for this war. And that’s a recipe for social con­flict.
Down in Tyre, my col­leagues are forced to walk in the city now, as no one is will­ing to take a car on the road, much less out of the city. The Israelis have dropped leaflets say­ing any vehi­cle seen mov­ing will be assumed to be Hezbol­lah and destroyed. Note that all the cars we jour­nal­ists drive are clearly marked with big “TV” on the sides and roofs delin­eat­ing us as media. No mat­ter to the Israelis, appar­ently.
The roads and bridges out of Tyre are blown up any­way. The last remain­ing dirt cause­way that was the only means of get­ting food and other aid south of the Litani was bombed a cou­ple of nights ago and the Israelis have threat­ened to blow up any bridge that’s built to replace it. Khaled Man­sour, the spokesman for the U.N. in Lebanon, told me the orga­ni­za­tion is wait­ing for autho­riza­tion from the IDF to build a bridge but so far, noth­ing.
It’s incred­i­bly seri­ous because accord­ing to Man­sour, there are between 70,000 and 130,000 peo­ple still left south of the Litani river, mainly con­cen­trated in Tyre and Rmaiche, a Chris­t­ian vil­lage south of Bint Jbail. In Tyre, the mar­kets are closed and the shelves are empty any­way. He said that while there is no star­va­tion yet, “They’re run­ning out of food very quickly.” WIth­out a bridge over the Litani, it will be impos­si­ble to get food into the region.
I’ve sub­mit­ted an essay to the _Singapore Strait Times_ which should be pub­lished this Sun­day. I’ll post the text or link when it’s avail­able, but for now, an excerpt:

The war came quickly to Lebanon, like an angry storm from the south, just hours after the Shi’ite group Hezbol­lah snatched two Israeli sol­diers in a dar­ing cross-border raid July 12.
The Israeli response was swift and ter­ri­ble. Roads, bridges, air­ports, the entire civil­ian infra­struc­ture of Lebanon, which had worked so hard in 15 years to rebuild from a dev­as­tat­ing civil war, was under assault because of the actions of an armed group inside its bor­ders and a furi­ous Israeli mil­i­tary that had been look­ing for a chance to get even ever since Hezbol­lah finally forced Israel from Lebanon in 2000.
Beirut, my home, changed overnight. Thou­sands of urbane, cos­mopoli­tan people–Christians, Sun­nis and Shi’ites alike–fled the coun­try to Syria. Or at least they high-tailed it to the moun­tains. Within days, many came from the south to take their place. Mostly poor Shi’ites, they came by the hun­dreds of thou­sands. Fill­ing aban­doned build­ings, schools and taken in by gen­er­ous Lebanese fam­i­lies. After three weeks of fight­ing, between 800,000 and 900,000 peo­ple — again, mostly poor Shi’ites — have been pushed up cheek-to-jowl with upper­class Chris­tians and Sunnis.

Also, here’s a piece I also did on the Rachidiye Pales­tin­ian camp, which lies just to the south of Tyre. In one of history’s bit­ter ironies, “they’re tak­ing in Lebanese refugees”:http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/08/05/MNG21KBVGS1.DTL&hw=allbritton&sn=004&sc=903.
The Israelis have started shelling or bomb­ing Dahiye again. While writ­ing this, a mas­sive blast rat­tled my win­dows. I can only hope that some­thing can be done to stop this.

TYRE — That’s what you hear when you go out in the south these days. Well, silence and the sounds of Israeli bombs and shells. Here’s an account of two days in the south:

ZEBQINE, south­ern Lebanon — In this vil­lage, 10 km south­east of Tyre, the only signs of life are two don­keys root­ing for food amid the rub­ble.
For­merly grand houses are now col­lapsed into piles of con­crete. Chil­drens’ toys and fam­ily books lie scat­tered under the August sun. The tobacco leaves, a main­stay crop in the region, still hang on the wires, long-since dried. But there are almost no peo­ple.
“About 70 per­cent or more of the peo­ple in the south are already gone,” said Khalid Man­sour, the spokesman for the United Nations in Lebanon. “They’ve been dis­placed.“
From jour­neys through more than a dozen vil­lages on Tues­day, it appears he’s right; south­ern Lebanon has been largely depop­u­lated, as the remain­ing res­i­dents took advan­tage of a 48-hour lull in Israel’s three-week long attacks to flee their destroyed vil­lages. Even in towns that have largely escaped the destruc­tion vis­ited on places such as Zebqine and Qana, there are very few signs of activ­ity. Most store­fronts are shut­tered, but not all. Except for a thick coat­ing of grime, some stores and cafés look like the own­ers just stepped away for a moment and would be right back. Homes are usu­ally locked, but one can look in to see old place set­tings on the table, a land-based ver­sion of the leg­end of the _Mary Celeste_.
It looks like the end of the world.
In Bourj ech Chemali, just out­side of Tyre, about 1,500 remain out of some 10,000 peo­ple, accord­ing to Ali Talib, 57, a long-time res­i­dent. In Tib­nine itself, a town of about 10,000 peo­ple, only about 200 remain accord­ing to Lebanese inter­nal secu­rity forces. And in the town of Haris, just before Tib­nine, only 40 peo­ple out of 8,000 remain, accord­ing to a woman await­ing a ride to Beirut along with six of her fam­ily mem­bers.
In all, some 800,000 to 900,000 Lebanese have been forced north from their homes, said Astrid van Gen­deren Stort, the spokes­woman for the United Nations High Com­mis­sioner for Refugees in Geneva. About 150,000 are in Syria, but the rest are stuffed into schools, com­mu­nity cen­ters or the pri­vate homes of gen­er­ous Lebanese.
“The sit­u­a­tion is becom­ing increas­ingly dire,” said Astrid van Gen­deren Stort, the spokes­woman for the United Nations High Com­mis­sioner for Refugees in Geneva. “Host fam­i­lies are shar­ing their homes with up to 30 or 40 peo­ple. It’s been three weeks. They’re eat­ing into their own reserves.“
The only other com­pa­ra­ble mass dis­place­ment in recent mem­ory is Kosovo in 1998, she said, where 800,000 peo­ple were dis­placed in the span of a month. And as bad as the dis­place­ment was, prob­lems con­tin­ued after the cease-fire was announced.
As soon as the Ser­bian forces with­drew, most of the 800,000 poured back across the bor­der to go home. “They were unstop­pable,” van Gen­deren Stort said. For months, the United Nations and other inter­na­tional orga­ni­za­tions had to deal with refugees return­ing to a dev­as­tated coun­try, destroyed homes and dead rel­a­tives. Much the same will hap­pen in Lebanon, she said.
But for now, the prob­lem is get­ting the peo­ple out of harm’s way, and most of them have largely moved north to Sidon or Beirut. Those too poor or too sick haven’t made it that far, and have instead clus­tered in the larger towns of the south such as Tib­nine, Qana or Tyre, where they squat in school and hos­pi­tal base­ments with­out elec­tric­ity, sur­rounded in Sty­gian black­ness and bathed in their own sweat.
With the announce­ment on Mon­day of the 48-hour lull in air strikes, hun­dreds of peo­ple emerged from towns across the south. For many, it was their first con­tact with the out­side world in almost three weeks.
Between 500 and 600 refugees made it from the destroyed town of Bint Jbail in the south to the Tib­nine Gov­ern­ment Hos­pi­tal, where they boarded buses and headed north to Sidon. About 200 remained in the hospital’s base­ment Tues­day, said Lebanese inter­nal secu­rity offi­cials.
But not all have left. Two broth­ers, Ali and Hus­sein Talib, 57 and 54, have stayed in Bourj ech Chemali to keep their gen­eral store open. It was one of pos­si­bly two stores seen open in the back­roads of the south all after­noon. They see their deci­sion to stay open as a com­bi­na­tion of duty and defi­ance.
“The first rea­son is to help the peo­ple who can­not find any­thing to eat,” said Ali, the older one. “The sec­ond rea­son is to boost their morale.”

My apolo­gies for not post­ing more. I’ve been hav­ing to beg time on satel­lite modems to file and with only 5 – 10 min­utes at a time to send and receive email, that doesn’t give a lot of time to write blog posts. That said, I’d like to address some­thing.
On sev­eral right-wing blogs, includ­ing the National Review Online, a com­ment I made about Hezbollah’s secu­rity mea­sures and their “has­sling” of jour­nal­ists has been taken to mean that we’re all Hezbol­lah stooges here … or some­thing. *This is not true.*
What I wrote was this: “To the south, along the curve of the coast, Hezbol­lah is launch­ing Katyushas, but I’m loathe to say too much about them. The Party of God has a copy of every journalist’s pass­port, and they’ve already has­sled a num­ber of us and threat­ened one.“
Let’s set aside that the Lebanese Inter­nal Secu­rity also has pho­to­copies of our pass­ports. The rea­son for the has­sling and the threat was that a reporter had filmed or described either a launch­ing site or Hezbol­lah posi­tions. (I’m not sure which.) To the best of my knowl­edge, that’s been the extent of the has­sling. I’m going to get in trou­ble for this, but I think it’s a rea­son­able restric­tion. This is the exact same restric­tions placed on jour­nal­ists by the Israeli army and by the Amer­i­cans in Iraq. I don’t think threat­en­ing jour­nal­ists is cool at all, and it cer­tainly doesn’t endear me to them, but that has been the extent of Hezbollah’s inter­fer­ence in our cov­er­age.
Why do I think it’s a rea­son­able restric­tion? Because I believe in stay­ing neu­tral as a jour­nal­ist. It’s not my job to help out the IDF or Hezbol­lah. Just as I wouldn’t give away Israeli posi­tions, I won’t give away Hezbol­lah posi­tions. By doing either, I threaten the neu­tral­ity that we depend on here for our access and our cred­i­bil­ity. Morally, I also think by giv­ing away posi­tions that could get peo­ple killed, whether they’re Hezbol­lah or IDF sol­diers, is to aid in the pos­si­bly killing of another human being. I’m _really_ not com­fort­able doing that.
This is mostly aca­d­e­mic, how­ever. Most of the time, we never even _see_ Hezbol­lah. They keep a very low pro­file and only come out when some­thing hap­pens, such as a bomb­ing. Then the boys with the walkie-talkies appear and wave their arms and yell and gen­er­ally push the reporters back until the fire­men come in and put out the fire or recover bod­ies. That’s been the extent of my deal­ings with Hezbol­lah, and it’s been the case with prob­a­bly 95 per­cent of the reporters here, too.
I do not have a Hezbol­lah “press pass,” as one com­menter sug­gested. They do not hold my pass­port (they have a pho­to­copy, pre­sum­ably.) I have nei­ther sought nor received per­mis­sion from any Hezbol­lah peo­ple to cover any­thing. No one has pre­vented me from cov­er­ing any­thing. The Pales­tini­ans in Rachidiye Refugee Camp did pre­vent me from tak­ing pic­tures of their gun­men, although I could still inter­view them. Every­thing I’ve reported I’ve either seen with my own eyes, or it has come from trusted non-Hezbollah sources. Like the ambu­lance story. I spoke with the dri­vers and I saw the very ambu­lances. It was not faked, and it was def­i­nitely an Israeli mis­sile of some kind that destroyed the ambu­lances.
As far as Qana, I wasn’t there. I don’t know what the scene was like, other than what my col­leagues — who I trust — told me and what I saw on tele­vi­sion. As for the death toll going down from 54 to 28, well, that hap­pens. It was appar­ently a con­fus­ing time and the mor­ti­cian at the al-Bass Gov­ern­ment Hos­pi­tal gave out some num­bers that included peo­ple also killed that day but in other places. As for why it took so long to get there, well, the strike hap­pened at night and no one trav­els much after dark here, cer­tainly not in the mid­dle of an Israeli bom­bard­ment. I don’t believe Qana was faked, as some blog­gers are charg­ing. Peo­ple like Michelle Malkin are full of it and refuse to see any­thing with even a scin­tilla of objec­tiv­ity or fair­ness. They are not jour­nal­ists; they are jokes.
So that’s the lat­est. I’m hav­ing recur­ring prob­lems find­ing dri­vers to take me around, but hope­fully that can be solved. I’m also open to story ideas. What would peo­ple like to see while I’m in the south await­ing a com­ing Israeli invasion.

BEIRUT — Sorry for the week­end silence. I meant to write yes­ter­day, but with the events in Qana and the riot/demonstration in Beirut, as well as me run­ning around try­ing to find a dri­ver and a way to file when I’m down in Tyre, time got away from me. I also, sorry to say, had to take a lit­tle break.
Beirut is split and strange. I have no real data on this, but after a week away from Beirut, it feels like it’s whistling past the grave­yard. The city is full of refugees from the south and Dahiyeh, but it’s not been hit in sevveral days. (This is before the 48-hour cease fire has gone into effect.) On my street, which is nor­mally very quiet, by early evening, there are dozens of peo­ple I’ve never seen before hang­ing out on bal­conies, milling about in the street. Chil­dren are much more com­mon as are women dressed in con­ser­v­a­tive hijabs. The south has come to the city, and the city has gone to the moun­tains. Beirut has become much more Shi’ite in the past three weeks.
The infra­struc­ture sit­u­a­tion is iffy. Inter­net is iffy, power is dom­i­nated by rolling black­outs. We still have water and taxis are still run­ning. I hear there’s still a bit of night-life, but I was only here for two days and didn’t feel much like going out.
My week in the south was instruc­tive. Most roads south of Tyre are free-fire zones. Peo­ple are dying every day and Lebanese Red Cross can’t get to the bod­ies. The mas­sacre in Qana was one of the most hor­ri­ble things I’ve ever seen but if this cease-fire doesn’t hold, we may see more of these things.
Some recent sto­ries:
* “A piece on the grow­ing anti-Americanism in Lebanon”:http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/07/28/MNG2RK79R81.DTL&hw=allbritton&sn=002&sc=409
* “An analy­sis of the polit­i­cal map in Beir­iut — and what Sin­iora must do”:http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/07/30/INGA0K5COQ1.DTL&hw=allbritton&sn=001&sc=1000
I head back to Tyre today after I buy a new lap­top that will work with my sat phone to file. With a 48-hour win­dow to move with­out air strikes, this is an oppor­tu­nity to see get to some of these vil­lages that we’ve not been able to get to.