LEILA FADEL, HOST:
Israel says it's been waiting for years for an opportunity to attack Hezbollah in Lebanon. Some of the fiercest strikes have been in the East Bekaa Valley. That's one place where Israel says the Iran-backed Lebanese militant group is hiding rockets and missiles in people's homes. It's provided scant evidence for that claim. And many of those killed and injured have been civilians, including children. Hezbollah took a small group of journalists to the Bekaa Valley this week, including NPR's Jane Arraf.
JANE ARRAF, BYLINE: We're at the Al Amal Hospital in Baalbek, a city known for its ancient Roman ruins, but now on the front lines of the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah.
ELIE MUBARAK: (Non-English language spoken).
ARRAF: Dr. Elie Mubarak, the medical director, says on Monday alone, they received 124 wounded and 18 dead. Surgeons here have been operating almost nonstop since then. Mubarak says they don't ask who the patients are. They treat both fighters and civilians.
We're following one of the nurses down this hallway into - past rooms, each one of them filled with patients apparently from the strikes this morning.
The nurse, Afran, has worked here for nine years. But after days of seeing the bodies of dismembered children, her eyes fill with tears.
AFRAN: (Non-English language spoken).
ARRAF: We use only Afran's first name, as we do for other interviewees in this story, for security reasons.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: (Non-English language spoken).
ARRAF: On another floor, the owner of a Beirut clothing shop had come from the cemetery where he buried his two sons. They were almost 15 and almost 20, he says. His older brother and a cousin were also killed in the strikes on Tuesday. He said his sons were sitting under a tree with no Hezbollah presence.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: (Through interpreter) If we had the position near us, we would have said we needed to take precautions, but we didn't have anything. We were sure that we were safe.
ARRAF: His adult daughter was seriously injured. Her room is full of relatives standing around the unconscious woman's bedside. In another town nearby, hospital director Mohammad Abdullah says in attacks last week when Israel detonated Hezbollah pagers and radios, a lot of the patients were Hezbollah. But in the airstrikes, most of them are civilians.
MOHAMMAD ABDULLAH: All the injuries are severe. We have here - we had here many children and women.
ARRAF: One of the patients is 7-year-old Mohammad. He's a thin boy with a bandaged head and hands wearing a soccer T-shirt, his eyes fixed on a "SpongeBob" cartoon on TV. His grandmother, Nawal Moussawi, leans over him when he moans.
NAWAL MOUSSAWI: (Non-English language spoken).
ARRAF: "Where is it hurting you, Grandson?" She asks. He says his head and his hands.
MOUSSAWI: (Non-English language spoken).
ARRAF: "All night, he was asking, Mama, Mama, what happened?" She says.
The only relatively safe way for journalists to get to the Bekaa Valley is with Hezbollah, which largely controls the area. Our Hezbollah guide tells us they're changing the schedule because we need to leave. Israel is bombing again, about 12 miles away. Heading off in a safer direction, we stop at three sites of Israeli airstrikes that morning and the previous day, the last in an industrial section of Baalbek.
This is the most badly hit site that we've been to yet. It looks like it was a complex of little shops. You can see destroyed washing machines and air coolers. And then everywhere, sacks of flour and sacks of sugar - so much sugar piled high. It looks like snowdrifts.
It's hard to get context here. I ask Ihab, our Hezbollah guide, about Israeli accusations that the group is hiding missiles and rockets in sites like these. Stepping through burst bags of flour and sugar and broken cans of ghee, he responds with sarcasm.
IHAB: There. I want to show you the missile. Rocket here. Don't you see? Don't see the rocket? Really? This is the rocket.
ARRAF: It's a can. It's a battered can of...
IHAB: This is the rocket what Israel say. This is rocket. Two, three. A lot of rocket here.
ARRAF: Ihab says workers left here when the airstrikes started. But he says afterwards, people came to try to salvage food from the ground. He says they're worried about a long, hungry winter.
Jane Arraf, NPR News, in the Bekaa Valley, Lebanon. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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