Cattle farmer Khairallah Yaacoub refused to leave south Lebanon despite a year of Hezbollah-Israel clashes. When full-scale war erupted, he and four others were stranded in their ruined border village. Yaacoub is among a handful of villagers in the war-battered south who have tried to stay put despite the Israeli onslaught.
He finally fled Hula village only after being wounded by shrapnel and losing half of his 16-strong herd to Israeli strikes. On October 19, three weeks into Israel's escalated war against Hezbollah, members of a UN peacekeeping force in Lebanon rescued three of Hula's five remaining residents including Yaacoub. They had been marooned by constant bombardment and with rubble-strewn access roads all but unpassable.
The two of the five remaining had no mobile phones and could not be located. "I wanted to stay with the cows, my livelihood. But in the end I had to leave them too because I was injured," Yaacoub, 55, told AFP.
With no immediate access to a hospital, he had to remove the shrapnel himself using a knife to cauterise his wound and then apply herbal medicine to it. "It was difficult for me to leave my house because warplanes were constantly circling above our heads and bombing around us," he said, describing weeks of sleepless nights amid intense strikes. Now north of Beirut, Yaacoub said he dreams of returning home.
"When I arrived in Beirut, I wished I'd died in Hula and never left," he said. "If there's a ceasefire, I will return to Hula that very ni.