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In Sidon and Tyre, where some 3,000 Palestinian guerrilla fighters had been based, civilians were the hardest hit. In Sidon the stench of death hovered around Israeli headquarters on bombed-out Maa Rouf Saad Square. "There is no way of knowing how many people died because so many are buried in the bomb shelters," said a local official. Block upon block of high-rise apartment buildings were smashed. Furniture and clothing hung from gaping holes in the buildings. A few houses were still burning. White flags made of bedsheets were tied to automobile antennas and to television aerials. Tresha Baassiri, 27, who had come to Sidon from Houston, Texas, to visit her Lebanese husband's relatives, fumbled for words to describe the horror. "Anyone who has never lived through it just cannot imagine what it was like," she said. "You finally welcomed the explosions because it meant that the awful screaming of the jets coming in for an attack would end."
At the Meome'h Palestinian refugee camp near Sidon, Jihan Mahmud, 41, was beginning to prepare dinner for her husband and their 14 children when the Israeli air and sea attack began. The family ran into one of the camp's underground shelters. "About 50 of us were cramped in the shelter," Mrs. Mahmud said. "The one next to ours was hit. There were hands and heads—pieces of people—flying everywhere. When that happened I couldn't stand it any more, so we just ran." Like other Palestinians in the camps, Mahmud and her relatives piled into whatever vehicles were available and headed for Beirut. In the confusion, she was separated from her husband and a daughter. Two weeks later she was camped out in the Garden of the Arts, where she stayed for two days. "I just want to go home," she said. "I know our house is destroyed, but I would live under a tree if I had to. I want to see my husband and daughter."
In Tyre, cement-block structures, corrugated metal and glass lay crumpled and twisted under the blow of the Israeli assault and P.L.O. resistance. Automobiles, totaled by shells, lay belly-up like helpless insects. At an improvised hospital, a Pakistani surgeon who has worked in the city for the past four years praised the Israelis for dropping leaflets in Arabic warning the townspeople to evacuate before the bombings began. As a result, the vast majority of civilians had survived in Tyre, though many were wounded, including the 17 men, women and children who were in the tiny clinic. One woman, so slight that she seemed to fill only half the bed, had been injured in the head during the bombardment of a Palestinian refugee camp. In apparent delirium, the woman repeated in Arabic, "Where is my husband?"