(4 of 10)
The Israeli cutoff of food and water was presumably aimed at heightening the tension between the local populace and the commandos. Instead, for the moment at least, the attack seemed merely to make the civilians angrier at the Israelis. A Lebanese woman, Mrs. Ihsan al Sirhi, stood in the shattered lobby of what had been her apartment house. The day before, her husband and one daughter had been killed in an Israeli raid. Tears streaming down her cheeks, she told a foreign journalist, "My daughter, my husband, blown up, dead. Thirty years of work wiped out. But God help me, they will pay for it. They took Palestine and now they have taken Lebanon. Where is there any justice?"
On Boustany Street in the Arab University area, Usama Zein sat in front of his small grocery store. The street was a litter of debris; power lines were down, apartments lay open to the sun, and the street was filled with rubble. Usama Zein said that about a quarter of the people in the neighborhood were still there, tucked away somewhere in the destroyed buildings, trying to survive. "Where else can we go?" he asked. "At first, some of us went to the schools for shelter, but then the schools were hit. So we thought, well, if we have to die, we should die at home."
Out of hundreds of shops along the much bombed Corniche Mazraa, only the Idriss grocery store was open for business.
The manager, Ahmed Lebdi, explained that on days when there was no shelling he tried to stay open for several hours. "Most of what we sell now is canned because there is no refrigeration," he said. "We have no milk, no bottled water. I don't know what we'll do. But I'll stay open."
At Zaidanieh, in the heart of the Sunni section of West Beirut, the atmosphere was one of defiance. A resident declared angrily, "Let Israel come. We know the Israelis are stronger, but we will win." He then took a visitor to his nearby home and showed him 15 rocket-propelled grenades that were lined up on a spare bed.
To people who have known Beirut in the past, the devastated city is an appalling sight. There is practically no vehicular traffic because there is no gasoline; the price of a five-gallon can reached $80 some weeks ago, and then the gas ran out. In Fakhani, almost every large building has suffered some damage. The sports stadium is smashed and the airport badly damaged; burned-out skeletons of jetliners sprawl on the tarmac.