The only reason Wissam is still alive is because he was afraid. When the pick-up he was riding in got a flat tire and was forced to stop, he was so nervous that he leapt from the bed of the truck. Seconds later an Israeli helicopter fired a missile at the vehicle in which he and his family were fleeing.

Shrapnel tore into his thigh, destroying arteries and muscle. The helicopter circled around. After a second volley, 23 of the 27 people in the truck were dead. “His family too, plese don’t ask any more questions,” pleads his doctor. The 15-year-old doesn’t know yet.

Since they began earlier this month, more than 1,500 people have been injured by Israeli bombardments in Lebanon. Hammoud Hospital in the Lebanese port city of Sidon is the place where many of those statistics gain faces and names.

Sidon is the third-largest city in Lebanon and is the first somewhat safe stop for refugees from Tyre, a town further south that has suffered daily bombing attacks on its center. Since the start of the latest crisis, Sidon has absorbed 31,000 refugees -- one refugee for every third resident.

Many of them have heard about Wissam’s plight. About how his family leapt on a flat-bed truck in the southern village of Marwaheen hoping to find shelter at a United Nations base. But when the soldiers refused to let them enter, the truck began rumbling toward Beirut without any protection. A warship fired at the vehicle first, then it was attacked by the helicopter.

Still, Wissam was lucky -- the Hammoud Hospital is the third-largest in Lebanon and is known as one of the country’s best. Doctors were able to save his leg even though it took 24 hours to evacuate him from the war zone of southern Lebanon. Only the toes on his right foot are black and blue -- the blood flow was cut off for too long. “He won’t get out of this entirely unscathed,” said his surgeon, Mohammad Wehbi.

"Then he fired"

Other patients in the nine-bed intensive-care ward weren’t as "lucky." The bandage covering the stump of Kudur Gazals’ right arm is soaked. Gazals faces several operations and two or three months in the hospital to recover from the injuries he suffered the day before, says Wehbi. The man was traveling in a clearly marked ambulance in Bourj-Rahal near Sour when an Israeli helicopter fired on the vehicle. “The (Israeli) pilot watched us for a while and knew that we had picked up injured people. Then he fired,” Gazals says.

It may have been the markings on the ambulance that sealed Gazals’ fate -- it belonged to the Shiite Amal militia. The pilot may have believed they were retrieving injured Hezbollah fighters, underlining the difficulties of a war where one side doesn’t wear any uniforms and recruits straight from the streets. Civilians look just like the enemy and can quickly become open season for Israel.

Hammoud Hospital has treated 116 victims of the fighting and tallied six deaths. For a private hospital with 1,000 employees and 320 beds, it’s not a problem. Still, that hasn't kept owner and chief physician Ghassan Hammoud from worrying. “I’m very afraid of what the next two or three days will bring,” the 70-year-old says in perfect German. He studied in Bonn, is married to a German and lives part-time in Germany's coal mining region, the Ruhr Valley. He could have easily pocketed his German passport and fled long ago.

Instead, Hammoud remains in a city flooded with refugees, worried that an Israeli ground offensive will lead to a downpour of patients. “Now it’s starting in the south,” he says. At the same time supplies are drying up. The hospital only has enough drugs to last through the week. “We are trying to get the basics from other Arab countries through the Syrian border but it’s difficult,” he says. There’s no sign of improvement -- 12 days after the start of an endless series of air strikes, Lebanese Social Affairs Minister Nayla Moawad has yet to contact the country’s third-largest hospital to find out how things are going.

"... otherwise we’re all dead"

“The government simply doesn’t have an emergency plan in the drawer,” Hammoud says. The man who once brought in German inspectors to review the quality of his hospital seems resigned. “We've arrived at a standstill. It’s too late for this country,” he says. “We’ll have to talk about it at some point … otherwise we’re all dead,” he says. As long as the crisis continues, political discourse is impossible. The people are carrying the weight of the war and Hezbollah is nowhere to be found.

But few here want to talk about the fact that Hezbollah is invisible because the people -- either out of fear or loyalty -- are hiding its members. In the schools of Tyre, where the refugees from Hezbollah regions are staying, no one will admit to having seen the militia or its bases. When one man says Israel was attacked from the valleys around his town before it retaliated, the group around him gestures for him to be quiet. On Friday, the chief physician from the hospital in Nabatiye refused to let journalists tour his hospital and instead offered a guided walk through the clinic’s basement. Nervous, he continually denied ever seeing or treating Hezbollah soldiers. A dozen unidentified men stood near him, listening closely.