Inside a hospital treating young victims of Israel's war with Hezbollah

Bekaa Valley, Lebanon — The carnage of Israel's war with Hezbollah — a conflict that is developing in parallel and with direct links to the devastating war in the gaza strip – continued over the weekend, with lives lost on both sides of the Israel-Lebanon border. In Gaza, health officials said Monday that the death toll from the war sparked by the Palestinian enclave's Hamas rulers, with their brutal Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel, had reached nearly 42,300, with nearly 99,000 injured. .

But as fighting continues in the decimated Gaza Strip, the Israeli army has made a decisive shift toward what it calls the northern front in its territory. broader war with Iranian-backed groups in the region approximately a month ago. Since then, Lebanese authorities say more than 2,300 people have been killed in the country and nearly 10,700 injured. The country's Health Ministry says 51 people died on Sunday alone.

Much of Israel's firepower has been directed at former Hezbollah strongholds in the southern suburbs of Beirut and throughout southern Lebanon. Major Israeli ground operations in the south have also put United Nations peacekeepers in the line of fire. But airstrikes have also hit Lebanon's eastern Bekaa Valley, often without prior notice.

Last week, CBS Information visited the region's Rayak Hospital, which has been treating some of the youngest victims of the expanding war, including 16-year-old Ali Jaddouh.

He had recently had at least one kidney severely damaged and at least partially removed his colon, as well as his right leg above the knee. He was in critical condition, with a dialysis machine doing the work of his shattered organs. He told us he was in pain, and his tormented eyes suggested it was more than just physical.

The teenager said he was at home with his family late in the morning when an Israeli airstrike hit their town of Shmustar. He said the missile could only have hit about 10 meters from where they were sitting.

“I wanted to run and help my mother, but I saw that she had a cut on her leg. “I lost consciousness and I don’t remember what happened next,” he said.

He woke up in the hospital and discovered that he had lost most of his leg.

“They told me that my father could be dead. “My mother can no longer walk: she lost a leg and suffered some damage to her back, and my older brother has a burnt face.”

Israel says it is targeting Hezbollah in Lebanon, the US-Israeli-designated terrorist group backed by Iran that has fired thousands of rockets and drones at Israel since October 8, 2023. That ongoing bombardment, which according to Hezbollah is in support of the The Palestinian people and the rest of Iran's allies, Hamas, include the Deadly drone attack over the weekend that killed four Israeli soldiers at a base in central Israel and wounded dozens of others.

The director of Rayak Hospital told CBS Information that for the past two weeks, the facility had only treated civilians. While our team was there over the weekend, there was another Israeli attack nearby. The agonized screams of two injured girls who had been rushed to the emergency room echoed through the hallways.

Nurse Mountaha Mkahal has been so busy caring for patients that, like many of Rayak's staff, she has been sleeping in the hospital.

“It's very hard and disturbing,” he told CBS Information. “I am morally obliged to be here in times of war, not just to do my job when there is security and peace. This is the essential moment.”

He knows that with airstrikes occurring frequently and without warning, members of his young family could walk through the emergency room doors at any moment.

Mkahal said seeing children suffer was the most difficult part of his job. Children like Sawsan, six years old, who arrived with six skull fractures. Doctors had to remove shrapnel from his brain. The girl was suffering so much that not even her mother's loving touch could ease the pain or erase the horror.

“It is very difficult to see a child suffer and it reminds me of my own children, but I am hopeful that those children and those people will recover and return to normal. “We have to do everything we can to help them recover, regardless of whether they recover completely or not,” the nurse said.

Many of Rayak's young patients will feel that recovery is a long way off, and for some, fear and pain are already being supplanted by other emotions inflicted by a war they did not help create and cannot help but stop.

When asked what he would say about the people who destroyed his village and his family, Ali Jaddouh told CBS Information: “May God take revenge.”

Tucker Reals contributed to this report.