Wounded woman survives 27 days in war zone

With shrapnel lodged in her leg, 73-year-old Mariam Toubeh survived for 27 days in her village on the frontline of the Lebanon war before help came.

During her ordeal, she said she and her cousin had to drag themselves along the ground to a rain water storage tank to drink.

“I could not stand up to get any food,” she said, speaking from a hospital bed in the southern city of Tyre. “We would pull ourselves along with our hands. We would look for anything to sweep the glass from the floor.”

Toubeh was wounded in her village of Aytaroun during the first days of Israel’s war with Hizbollah, which ended this week with a U.N.-backed truce.

Rescuers said they found her and a cousin on Tuesday when they were finally able to enter the area of some of the most fierce fighting. Aid agencies had been calling for weeks for access to the south to help people trapped by the conflict.

Toubeh said the shell which wounded her killed two of her relatives who sought shelter in the family’s old stone home in the village just a few kilometers from the border with Israel.

“The smell of the dead next to us made us sick,” she said. “Worms were crawling from their bodies onto us. There was nobody in the village to help us. They had fled. The Israelis were trying to enter.

“The shelling continued over our heads. We felt the house was going to collapse on us. Night and day it did not stop. We could not see because of the dust thrown up by the rockets and shells.”

Simmering rage
Toubeh’s leg was set in plaster this week, with extra bandages on the wound where doctors had removed the shrapnel.

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Having gone untreated for 27 days, she was not sure whether they could save the limb.

“I would squeeze my wound to push out pus and pieces of shrapnel — the shrapnel from the bombs which America, not Israel, dropped on us. America wants to take over the whole world,” Toubeh said.

She could not believe her eyes when help finally arrived.

“I said: ‘Please, save me! My cousin and I are going to die!’. They took us to the hospital in Tibnin. They did not find doctors there so they brought us here,” she said.

Azza Sheikh Ali, 66, spent 13 days wounded in the village of Rshaf before the Red Cross brought her to the same hospital on Tuesday. She had been unable to move from her bed after being wounded by a blast.

“One day, the Israelis came into my room. I made out that I couldn’t hear them. I didn’t respond to them at all. They thought I was dead,” she said. “I thought it was better not to speak so they wouldn’t kill me.”