A Week of Chaos Pushes Lebanon’s Doctors to the Limit

A Week of Chaos Pushes Lebanon’s Doctors to the Limit

Exploding wireless devices maimed thousands. An Israeli airstrike on Friday flattened two buildings. Many doctors, exhausted, wonder how the country will cope if violence continues.

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By Euan Ward

Reporting in the aftermath of attacks in and around Beirut, Lebanon

Dr. Dania El-Hallak was already exhausted. After wireless devices exploded across Lebanon, there had been little time to process what she had seen — the hundreds of wounded, many of their faces disfigured beyond recognition.

“I am hoping that it was all just a bad dream,” Dr. El-Hallak said, still struggling to take stock of the carnage on Friday.

Then, without warning, Israeli fighter jets ripped through the skies above Lebanon’s capital.

“There are strikes in Dahiya?” she said in disbelief, using the Arabic name for Beirut’s southern suburbs.

Her nightmare had only just begun.

The attacks on Hezbollah’s communication devices this week — widely attributed to Israel — wounded thousands of people, leaving many of them permanently disabled and in need of long-term rehabilitative care. The Israeli airstrike just miles from downtown Beirut on Friday, which killed at least 37 people and injured dozens more, has only added to the toll. Others are still presumed trapped in the debris.

Lebanon’s ailing health system — already embattled by a crippling economic collapse — has been sent into overdrive.

“The sense is that war is inevitable, especially after yesterday’s air raid,” said Dr. Ghassan Abu Sitta, the chief reconstructive surgeon at the American University of Beirut Medical Center.

Last year, Dr. Abu Sitta spent 43 days volunteering in Gaza at Shifa hospital’s burn treatment unit. When the Israeli airstrike hit on Friday as he was still operating on those wounded in the wireless device attacks, he said it felt like he was suddenly back in the besieged Palestinian enclave.

“We are stuck in this loop,” Dr. Abu Sitta said. “You just operate and operate. You feel like you are playing catch up all the time.”

For 11 months, Hezbollah has been firing into northern Israel in support of Hamas in Gaza. Israel has responded by bombarding Lebanon and assassinating the Hezbollah’s leaders. More than 160,000 civilians have fled areas on both sides of the border. The violence seen in recent days, however, has represented a significant escalation in the conflict, fueling fears that Israel is beckoning all-out war.

The sudden brutality of the wireless device attacks this week, which saw pagers and hand-held radios detonate without warning, have shocked even the most hardened of Lebanese doctors. Eyes blown out of their sockets. Faces torn to pieces by burning shards of plastic. Hands and fingers so mangled that doctors had no choice but to amputate them.

Many of the victims — among them women and children — would never see again, doctors said.

“This attack was literally directed at the eyes,” said Dr. Pierre Mardelli, a veteran eye doctor who answered the call for volunteers this week when news broke of the first wave of explosions on Tuesday.

His patients said they had received an error message on their pagers, prompting them to try to fix the problem. Then the devices exploded in their hands. It appeared to be one of the key factors that accounted for so many people being blinded.

“People did not even have time to blink,” he said.

With hospitals swamped by the influx of patients, Dr. Mardelli said he was forced for the first time in his 27-year career to suture eye wounds without anesthesia.

“It was an indiscriminate attack,” Firass Abiad, Lebanon’s health minister, told reporters on Thursday, describing the burden the attacks had put on Lebanon’s health system. “It was a war crime.”

Mr. Abiad has pledged to pay for the long-term care of those injured, but Lebanese remain skeptical of any promises by the country’s ailing government. Despite assurances, the health system itself would most likely be unable to cope in the event of an all-out conflict, doctors said.

“The Lebanese health system is in no way able to treat war wounded if it were to escalate into a full-blown war,” Dr. Abu Sitta said.

The rehabilitation process, doctors said, would be a long and difficult road for hundreds if not thousands of people.

Dr. Antoine Abi Abboud, who leads the plastic and reconstructive surgery unit at Beirut’s Mount Lebanon hospital, estimated that at least 40 percent of those wounded in the wave of wireless device attacks had been left permanently disabled.

The hospital had received some of the most severe cases on Tuesday because of its proximity to Beirut’s southern suburbs, where the bulk of the pager detonations took place. Dr. Abi Abboud said most of the people he treated had lost one or both of their eyes.

“It was savage,” he said.

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