Mr Ahmar: “We work 24 hours. In the past three weeks, we haven’t been sleeping or eating and we haven’t had time for anything. After every air strike, we have to be there. We have to look for missing people, we have to move bodies and put out fires.”
As he spoke, clearly exhausted and with big bags under his eyes, he was constantly interrupted by phone calls from his rescue teams.
He said civil defence units had evacuated their bases in Beirut’s southern suburbs where many of the Israeli strikes had landed, after telephone warnings from Israel to leave. They now based themselves outside and rushed in after each strike, he said.
He insisted that “99 per cent” of those his men had pulled from the rubble were civilians.
He recalled one strike where his men had been unable to find the remains of a young woman missing in the rubble. Every few days he received a new voice message from her mother, pleading with him to send his men back to search again.