The Guardian reports:

The flood of wounded came after Israel bombed more than 100 targets across Lebanon in those 10 minutes on Wednesday, killing more than 300 people and wounding 1,165, according to an initial count by Lebanon’s civil defence. The death toll, which was expected to rise as more bodies were found, was higher than Beirut’s 2020 port explosion – one of the largest non-nuclear explosions in human history.

The Israeli military said it had hit Hezbollah “command and control centres” in the bombing campaign, which it dubbed “Operation Eternal Darkness”.

But residents and Lebanese officials said the strikes, which used 1,000lb bombs in densely packed residential areas of Beirut, mainly killed civilians. Lebanon’s prime minister, Nawaf Salam, accused Israel in a statement of targeting “densely populated residential neighbourhoods” and killing unarmed civilians in breach of international law.

Abu-Sittah said most of the people were wounded in a very short period of time, which was “intentional to flood the health system”, and he compared the aftermath to the mass casualty events he saw while working in Gaza.

The AUBMC received about 70 wounded people all at once; many critically injured, according to Dr Firass Abiad, a surgeon and Lebanon’s former health minister. Crush injuries, lots of elderly people, a woman who had to have both her legs amputated – Abiad rattled off the toll of the day in a tired voice.

“There was a 90-year-old who I just left a bit ago. He passed away from his wounds … There was nothing we could do,” Abiad said. “These are civilians who, without any warning, their whole apartment building was flattened. So you can imagine the severity of injuries that we’re getting.”

First responders in Barbour worked to find people trapped under the rubble. Firefighters sprayed water on the smouldering remains of the building while forklifts lifted crumpled cars to clear the road for ambulances. An emergency worker on the scene said they had not yet found any survivors, only pieces of people.

A man FaceTimed his son, showing him a crumpled car. “You said it was a Volkswagen?” he said, haplessly looking at the crowd around him as he inspected the car. Its badge had been blown off the bumper and the twisted metal left the car unrecognisable.

Rakha watched as the civil defence worked. “I really didn’t think something like this would happen here. Nothing like this happened in the last war [and] because of that all of the refugees came here for safety,” the 38-year-old supermarket owner said, his head wrapped in a blood-stained bandage.

Barbour, like many of the areas in Beirut that Israel struck on Wednesday, is a mixed neighbourhood where Hezbollah enjoys little support. As more than 1.1 million people were displaced by Israeli bombing over the last month, schools in Barbour opened their doors to shelter the fleeing families. [Continue reading…]