"They hit everything' Thousands flee villages as bombs start to fall

Hassan waited until the last minute to flee. As Israeli warplanes thundered overhead and bombs began to fall on the forests surrounding his hometown of Deir al-Zahrani in south Lebanon on Monday morning, he told himself he still had some time.

- William Christou

For almost a year, the town, 12 miles from the border, had been mostly spared from the fighting between Israel and Hezbollah that had engulfed much of south Lebanon.

The bombs grew closer. His neighbours began to get calls from unknown numbers with a pre-recorded message, the voice speaking classical Arabic with a strange accent: "If you are in a building where there are Hezbollah weapons, distance yourself from the village." Hassan had no idea if the homes around him had weapons in them. Houses in the village began to get hit.

"Civilians, houses, they hit everything. When they started striking civilians, we had to flee. A few of my relatives were killed," Hassan, 23, said, sitting in a school in Dekwaneh, a suburb north of Beirut, which had been converted into a shelter for displaced people less than 24 hours earlier.

Dier al-Zahrani was no longer safe as Israel carried out a devastating aerial barrage on wide swathes of south Lebanon and the Bekaa Valley that killed 558, injured 1,835 and forced tens of thousands to flee their homes.

It was Lebanon's deadliest day in almost 50 years, with the death toll in the fighting between Hezbollah and Israel in October more than 1,200, exceeding that of the brutal 2006 war between the two.

Hassan and six other members of his family grabbed a few possessions, crammed into a BMW sedan and headed towards Beirut.

"We were telling ourselves that maybe it would stop, maybe there would be something that let us stay. But we found nothing that stopped us from leaving," he said.