"The bombing is random' South Beirut now ghost town after week of attacks

The army checkpoints at the entrance of Dahiyeh, the southern suburb of Beirut where airstrikes have frequently hit what Israel claimed to be Hezbollah targets, were left unmanned.

- William Christou

The soldiers that usually stood guard were nowhere to be seen, though there were no cars passing through for them to check anyway.

On the largely empty streets it seemed as if residents had left in a hurry. An orange juice seller's cart stood abandoned on the side of the road, a pile of soot-covered oranges left to rot. Aluminium shutters had been pulled down over shopfronts lining the main thoroughfare.

A district that usually teems with life was silent, as the acrid smoke hung over it.

Almost all of the nearly half a million residents of Beirut's southern suburbs have fled since last week, escaping Israeli bombing. Authorities say that across Lebanon, nearly 1 million people have been displaced by the bombing over the last two weeks.

"Israel is hitting the civilian population because they think it will break their will. But people don't want Israel to win, so they are saying that their will won't break," said Dr Ali Ahmad, a professor at the Lebanese University who had accompanied journalists on a Hezbollah-organised tour of his home district.