Israel has said its campaign of air strikes on Lebanon has been targeting Hezbollah leadership, fighters, logistics, and arms caches to stop barrages of rockets into northern Israel.
Hezbollah fired more than 100 rockets at Haifa on Tuesday.
At Tyre’s Hiram hospital, staff said they had lost count of the number of casualties they had treated in the past two weeks and none had been fighters.
The Telegraph was accompanied by a Hezbollah minder at the hospital and it was unclear if staff were able to speak freely.
“On the first two days of the bombardment, you couldn’t even walk in the corridor because it was so full,” said one doctor who declined to be named.
Almost all of those he had treated were women, children or old men, he said.
“They have had amputations, they have had burns, fractures, everything.”
‘We thought we would be safe’
One old man lying in the ward said he had been wounded a day earlier in his village of Tayr Falsay. A building next to his home had been hit and he had been struck on the head by a piece of masonry.
He said: “I was sitting with my family, with my daughters. The explosion happened, I fell over and realised I was bleeding from my head.”
“We had not evacuated, because our village had only been hit twice in the past two weeks and we thought we would be safe.”
An orthopaedic surgeon at the hospital said he had been sleeping in the building because he was so busy.
He said: “We have faced many difficult cases. All of them have been civilians. I have just come out of theatre operating on a six-year-old boy with a wounded shoulder.”
At that point, he was interrupted by the blast across the road.