Bekaa Valley, Lebanon — The carnage of Israel’s war with Hezbollah — a conflict playing out in parallel and with direct links to the devastating war in the Gaza Strip — continued over the weekend, with lives lost on both sides of the Israel-Lebanon border. In Gaza, health officials said Monday that the toll from the war sparked by the Palestinian enclave’s Hamas rulers, with their Oct. 7, 2023 terrorist attack on Israel, had reached almost 42,300, with nearly 99,000 others wounded.
But while fighting in the decimated Gaza Strip continues, the Israeli military made a determined shift to what it calls the northern front in its broader war with Iran-backed groups in the region about a month ago. Since then, Lebanese officials say more than 2300 people have been killed in the country, and almost 10,700 others wounded. The country’s health ministry says 51 people were killed on Sunday alone.
Much of Israel’s firepower has been directed at Hezbollah’s longtime strongholds in Beirut’s southern suburbs and across the south of Lebanon. Major Israeli ground operations in the south have also put United Nations peacekeepers in the line of fire. But airstrikes have also pummelled Lebanon’s eastern Bekaa Valley — often with no warning.
Last week, CBS News visited the region’s Rayak Hospital, which has been treating some of the youngest victims of the expanding war, including 16-year-old Ali Jaddouh.
He recently had at least one badly damaged kidney and his colon at least partially removed, as well as his right leg above the knee. He was in critical condition, with a dialysis machine doing the job of his shattered organs. He told us he was in pain, and his haunted eyes suggested it was more than just physical.
The teenager said he was at home with his family late in the morning when an Israeli airstrike slammed into their town of Shmustar. He said the missile could only have struck about 10 yards from where they were sitting.
“I wanted to run and help my mother, but I saw my leg was cut. I lost consciousness and I don’t recall what happened next,” he said.
He woke up in the hospital to find he’d lost most of his leg.
“I was told that my father might be dead. My mother can’t walk anymore — she lost her leg and had some damage in her back, and my eldest brother’s face is burned.”
Israel says it is targeting Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Iran-backed, U.S. and Israeli-designated terrorist group that’s fired thousands of rockets and drones at Israel since Oct. 8, 2023. That ongoing barrage, said by Hezbollah to be in support of the Palestinian people and Iran’s other allies, Hamas, includes the deadly drone attack over the weekend that killed four Israeli troops at a base in central Israel and wounded scores of other people.
Rayak Hospital’s director told CBS News that over the past two weeks, the facility had treated only civilians. While our team was there over the weekend, there was another Israeli strike nearby. The agonising screams of two wounded girls who’d been rushed onto the emergency ward echoed through the halls.
Nurse Mountaha Mkahal has been so busy looking after patients that, like many of the staff at Rayak, she’s been sleeping at the hospital.
“It’s very hard and unsettling,” she told CBS News. “I am morally obliged to be here in war time – not only to do my job when there is safety and peace. This is the crucial time.”
She knows that with airstrikes coming often and without warning, members of her own young family could come through the emergency room doors any time.
Mkahal said seeing children suffer was the hardest part of her job. Children like six-year-old Sawsan, who was brought in with six fractures to her skull. Doctors had to remove shrapnel from her brain. The little girl was in so much pain that not even her mother’s loving touch could ease the hurt or erase the horror.
“It’s very hard to see a child suffering, and it reminds me of my own children, but I am hopefull those children and people will recover and go back to normal. We have to do our best to help them recover, regardless of whether they can recover completely or not,” said the nurse.
Recovery will feel a long way off for many of the young patients at Rayak and, for some, fear and pain are already being supplanted by other emotions inflicted by a war they didn’t help create, and cannot help to stop.
Asked what he would say about the people who tore his village and his family apart, Ali Jaddouh told CBS News: “May God take revenge.”
contributed to this report.
