LEBANON: The thousands of leaflets that fluttered onto the seafront at the weekend sent a wave of panic and confusion through Lebanon's second city, writes Lara Marlowe in Sidon. "We advise everybody to leave, and not to stay near Hizbullah positions," Israel said. Since there are no Hizbullah positions in Sidon, no one was sure what to do.
Returning to Tyre and the villages of the south was out of the question. Israel has blown up every bridge between the two southern cities and the country back roads are littered with bomb craters and destroyed cars. Many vehicles are simply abandoned, because they ran out of fuel.
After ordering people to flee, Israel bombed almost all the petrol stations. A 20-litre can now sells for $50.
To the north, the Shia neighbourhoods of Beirut are also bombed every day and the schools where refugees live are overflowing. Though a few families tried to leave after the leaflets were dropped, most decided to wait out the war in Sidon.
"It's like being in a big prison," says Ghena Hariri, the US-educated niece of the late prime minister Rafik Hariri, who was assassinated in February 2005.
"The Israelis keep cutting it into smaller cells. Day after day, the cells are shrinking."
Since the war started a month ago tomorrow, Sidon has doubled in population, with 130,000 Shia Muslim refugees from the villages further south sheltering among as many Lebanese and Palestinian Sunnis, who live in the country's largest refugee camp at Ein Helwe.
Sidon still mourns Hariri, the native son who started life as the offspring of a fruit farmer, became a construction magnate in Saudi Arabia and returned to rebuild Lebanon after the 1975-1990 civil war.
Hariri was the only Lebanese leader who never had a militia, the only one who rose above sectarian politics to be loved in all the country's religious communities. Even Hizbullah supporters in Tyre still put up photographs of Hariri in their shops.
Now Hariri's family are threatened from both sides. His sister Bahia, a member of parliament, does not leave her luxurious villa on the heights of Majdelioun for fear of assassination.
A UN inquiry into the murder of Hariri and 21 others stalled after Syria was named the prime suspect. Before the war started, Mrs Hariri's security men found a store of rockets down the road from her house and advised her to move to the sheltered side of the building.
Although the Hariris epitomise the moderate, westernised, democratic and business-oriented elite whom the US would like to promote in the Middle East, they are threatened physically and politically by Israel's war on Lebanon.
Israel dropped three bombs on the Fine tissue paper factory, a few hundred metres from Bahia Hariri's villa. "Rumour has it that the company won a contract with Unifil that used to be held by an Israeli company," says Ghena Hariri.
"You hear the same story about the Liban Lait milk factory. At the beginning, we thought the Israelis were targeting Hizbullah, but they're just hitting everything."
Israel is destroying Lebanon, not Hizbullah, one hears every day here.
"In Lebanon, history always repeats itself," says Dr Ghassan Hammoud, a friend of the Hariri family and the owner of Sidon's best hospital. "Because everyone covets Lebanon. It's the most beautiful place in the Middle East and no want wants to see it prosper, as it did under Hariri. They are jealous."
Dr Hammoud admits that many Maronites, Sunnis and Druze do not like Hizbullah. "But they don't speak against them, because they're afraid it would start a war. They don't want to add a civil war to war with the Israelis."
He estimates that between 40 and 50 per cent of the Lebanese population are Shia. With the Bekaa, Beirut's southern suburbs and the south in ruins, they have nowhere to go. "What do you do with them? Drive them into the sea?" he asks.
Though Bahia Hariri believes the Shia represent only 35 per cent of the population, she insists they have a rightful place in Lebanon. "If we want to rebuild the state - and that is the only solution - you cannot do it by eliminating one-third of the population," she says.
Mrs Hariri says pro-Syrian Lebanese factions tried to turn Shia against Sunni after her brother's murder and Israel is now trying to do the same thing. The desperate need to maintain civil peace is a principal reason why the Hariri Foundation is providing for the basic needs of 75,000 of Sidon's 130,000 Shia refugees.
"It's not relief work," Mrs Hariri insists. "We are trying to unite people. This is the challenge, because Israel wants to divide us."
Her daughter Ghena (27) heads a team of 3,000 volunteers.
She helps to organise refugee convoys out of villages under Israeli attack.
"One night I got a phone call at 9pm, from a relative of the Awada family in Aitaroun village," she recounts. "There were 12 people, parents and children. I worked on the documentation until midnight, contacting the interior ministry and the International Red Cross. I returned home and turned on the television, and the family was gone. I was devastated.
"It was the first time I wept in this war. They would have been evacuated the next morning."
Dr Hammond says if the Hariri Foundation was not taking care of refugees, "Sidon would be a disaster. They are giving them hot meals. I told Bahia, 'Stop. You don't know how long this is going to last.' She said, 'As long as I can, I will.' She is trying to be like her brother."
Mrs Hariri says: "If Rafik were still alive, things would not have come to this point. In [ the Israeli offensives of] 1993 and 1996, he used his contacts with leaders in Washington, Europe and the Middle East to put an end to it. Everyone feels the void, the loss of Rafik."
As a Muslim, Mrs Hariri believes her murdered brother "is in a better place" where he nonetheless senses what is happening to his beloved Lebanon. "He cannot be at peace," she says.
"If my uncle saw this, it would break his heart," adds her daughter Ghena.
Ghassan Hammoud knew Hariri in the 1960s, before he left for Saudi Arabia. "He had a big vision about how to make Sidon beautiful," Hammoud says. "I used to fly to Riyadh to see him and he said he would make Sidon like Nice and the Riviera."
During the 1982 Israeli invasion, Hariri, already a millionaire, returned to Lebanon incognito, took a taxi to Sidon and toured the damaged city with his friend, Dr Hammoud.
"It was terrible for him," recalls Hammoud. "He was very sad and he said, 'When it's over, I am going to rebuild everything.' The Israelis were still here when he started sending money and engineers. This time, there is no one like him . . . They destroyed everything he built. It is as if the Hariri era never existed."
Every bed in Hammoud's 320-bed hospital is taken. If the Israelis carry out their threat to bomb Sidon, "I will have to put them on the floor, or two patients to a bed", Dr Hammoud says.
From her exile in Paris, Mrs Nazek Hariri, Rafik's widow, has taken an interest in Hassan Ali Jubaili (38), a civil defence worker whose legs were cut off by an Israeli missile a few days after the war started.
When the bombardments stop, Mrs Hariri intends to fly Jubaili to France, to be fitted with the best artificial legs that money can buy.
In his bed at Hammoud hospital, Mr Jubaili, a father of three, lifts the blanket from the two stubs where his legs were, to show the world what the Israelis are doing.
His normal job was installing aluminium shutters and doors, but he became a civil defence volunteer "because I wanted to help people in this war".
Mr Jubaili rushed to the Sidon bridge at 3pm on July 15th after the Israelis bombed it. He was extracting nine badly wounded people from a minibus when the planes returned 15 minutes later to bomb again. Attacking rescue workers has been a common Israeli practice at least since the 1982 invasion.
Mr Jubaili heard the aircraft and started to drive away, "but there was a woman weeping beside the road. I had to stop," he recounts. "The MK [ drone] fired the rockets that cut my legs off."
Drones are remotely piloted aircraft which relay images in real time. Someone in Israel watched Mr Jubaili's ambulance start to leave the scene of the bombing, then stop. Someone in Israel pushed the button.