Until a few weeks ago, workers with the Lebanese Civil Defense in the small southern village of Derdghaiya would borrow ambulances from neighboring towns to conduct rescue missions. After the Israeli military escalated its bombardment of southern Lebanon last month, however, resources across the country’s health sector became scarce. Emergency vehicles for the Civil Defense, the country’s emergency medical service, became harder to access.
On September 17, when Israeli intelligence began detonating a series of bombs embedded in pagers and walkie-talkies across Lebanon, the scope of the problem became clear. While Israel claimed that the attack targeted members of Hezbollah, the devices exploded in public spaces like grocery stores and cafes, killing and injuring scores of people and sending Lebanon’s first responders scrambling.
Unable to locate an ambulance, Civil Defense workers in Derdghaiya used vegetable carts to transport the wounded.
Bachir Nakhal, a Beirut-based volunteer, had previously helped fundraise for new emergency medical kits in the Tyre region of Lebanon, which includes Derdghaiya. In the days after the pager and walkie-talkie bombings, Nakhal told the regional Civil Defense director, Abdullah al-Moussawi, that he would try to collect funds to purchase an ambulance for the village Derdghaiya.
WhatsApp messages were exchanged, Instagram posts went up, and soon Nakhal found himself coordinating the delivery of a shiny new first-responder van to Derdghaiya. Members of the local Civil Defense branch were thrilled with the news, Nakhal recalled, and they sent him messages thanking him for his support and photos posing beside the ambulance.
“The area is full of gunpowder and airstrikes and dust,” al-Moussawi said in a voice message to Nakhal. “As disturbed as we are by the strikes and the bombing, we are uplifted by this support.”
“It’s the A, B, Cs of ethnic cleansing.”
The excitement was short-lived. Four days later, on October 9, an Israeli airstrike targeted the Civil Defense center in Derdghaiya, killing five first responders, including al-Moussawi and his brother. Photos from the wreckage show the charred skeleton of the recently procured vehicle, as well as the rubble of an adjacent church and a home in which two other civilians were killed.
“I fully believe this is purposeful targeting of emergency services because Israel’s strategy is not just to target civilians, it’s to maim them, to render them unable to work, to render whole regions unlivable,” said Nakhal, citing the Israeli military’s targeting of health care infrastructure in Gaza. “It’s the A, B, Cs of ethnic cleansing.”
Photo: Courtesy of Bachir Nakhal
War Crimes?
The strike was only the latest in a string of attacks against Lebanese first responders. According to the United Nations, over 100 medical and emergency workers have been killed across Lebanon since last October when Israel’s war on Gaza began, with many of the casualties occurring within the past several weeks.
“Frontline workers, protected under International Humanitarian Law (IHL), are civilians risking their lives to help others and should never be targeted,” said Imran Riza, the U.N. Humanitarian Coordinator for Lebanon, in an October 3 statement. “These attacks disrupt essential services, delay critical care, and violate the right to healthcare, endangering both aid workers and the vulnerable populations they serve.”
The targeting of health care workers and infrastructure is a violation of international humanitarian law codified in the Geneva Conventions, which 195 countries, including Israel, have ratified. (The Israeli military did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)
The United Nations recently announced that Israeli attacks have forced 98 health care facilities across Lebanon to shutter.
As successive economic crises over the past several decades shrunk the Lebanese public sector, the Lebanese Civil Defense came to rely on a growing number of volunteers — young men like Nakhal with emergency medical training interested in taking up public service work.
Nabil Salhani, a director in charge of the Civil Defense’s training and schools division, told The Intercept that the service has 230 stations across Lebanon, from the southern borderlands to the mountainous north. Around 2,500 of its first responders are on the government’s payroll; the remaining 6,000 are volunteers.
Localities without official Civil Defense stations often have their own municipal emergency groups, as do political parties like the Amal Movement and Hezbollah, which provide public health services across the country’s south. (Both parties have armed wings, which operate separately from their civil functions.)
After the chaos of the pager attacks, Nakhal said, the disparate emergency groups began to operate together.
“We were all there in the dozens and hundreds of first responders,” he said. “All of these teams were working in the same spot, removing the same rubble together.”
“A Sense of Duty”
As Israel began to heavily bombard Palestinains in the Gaza Strip last October, a low-grade conflict also broke out on Israel’s northern border. Occasional strikes by Hezbollah were met by more frequent attacks by Israel into Lebanese territory.
Israeli strikes were largely concentrated in southern Lebanon. First responders incurred injuries from mine fields, cluster munitions, and inhalation of white phosphorus, an incendiary substance that produces thick, toxic smoke and is restricted under international law.
The first major targeting of first responders took place in late March, when seven paramedics with the Emergency and Relief Corps of the Lebanese Succour Association were killed in a strike on their center in the southern Lebanese town of Hebbariyeh. While the Israeli military said the strike eliminated an “armed individual” with connections to the medical group, a report from Human Rights Watch found no evidence of a military target at the site.
Since then, the war has intensified, and dozens of paramedics and firefighters from the Civil Defense and other first response groups have been killed on the job.
Several months ago, Civil Defense workers were responding to strikes on individual buildings in Beirut’s southern suburb of Dahiya, Nakhal said. These days, the emergency workers are pulling up to find entire blocks decimated. While the Israeli military announces each of these strikes as targeted attacks on high-ranking members of Hezbollah, they have led to hundreds of civilian casualties and terrorized the Lebanese population.
“The assassinations are a scene, and the show that they want us to watch is their impunity, the level of destruction they’re raining down on us,” Nakhal said.
In September, the Israeli military bombed a fire truck belonging to the Civil Defense in the southern Lebanese town of Faroun, killing three first responders and injuring two. The Lebanese Health Ministry said the men were fighting fires caused by Israeli airstrikes; the Israeli military said it had “struck and eliminated terrorists.”
“The assassinations are a scene, and the show that they want us to watch is their impunity, the level of destruction they’re raining down on us.”
Earlier this month, 10 firefighters were killed in an Israeli strike on a municipal building in Baraachit, a rural town in southern Lebanon. The men had been “ready to go out on rescue missions,” a Health Ministry spokesperson said; the Israeli military announced that Hezbollah fighters had been using the fire station as a military post.
He added that Nakhal noted that the strikes on medical workers had been accompanied by Israeli attacks against other civilian infrastructure. Israel recently targeted a major water supply route on the Litani River, another essential service no longer available in the region.
Several days after the strike on Derdghaiya, the Israeli military published a tweet claiming, without evidence, that Hezbollah is using ambulances to transport weapons. Nakhal said that despite these statements, which indicate continued targeting of Civil Defense workers, he and other volunteers would not abandon their posts.
“There is a risk, and we’re not blind to it, but there’s also a sense of duty,” he said. “You need to make sure your services are there. You have to make sure you can support your people.”