Blood and fury: In northern Lebanon – the price of a war of endless revenge

May 2007: Robert Fisk visits Nahr el-Bared to witness the devastation of war

Under fire: in May 2007, a motorcyclist rides past burning tires at the entrance of the Palestinian refugee camp of Bedawi, adjacent to Nahr al-Bared (AFP/Getty)

It is a place of Palestinian fury – and almost as much Palestinian blood. The bandage-swaddled children whimpering in pain, frowning at the strange, unfatherly doctors, the middle-aged woman staring at us with one eye, a set of tubes running into her gashed-open stomach, a series of bleak-faced angry young men, their bodies and legs torn apart.

There was eight-year-old Youssef al- Radi, who was cut open by shrapnel in the arm and back yesterday morning and brought to the Palestinian Safad hospital at Badawi, another refugee camp in Tripoli, his feet bleeding, a tiny figure on a huge stretcher. He hasn’t been told that his mother died beside him. Nor that his father is still in the Nahr el-Bared camp.

And let us not forget six-year-old Aiman Hussein, who was hit by up to a hundred pieces of metal from a Lebanese army shell – in the neck and the spine, the tibia, the foot, the back, you name it. The doctors had to rush him to Tripoli because they could not operate. Visit the Safad hospital if you dare. Or climb gingerly out of your car on the Lebanese army’s front line at Nahr el-Bared and walk past the sweating, tired soldiers who have been told they are defending Lebanon’s sovereignty by doing battle with the gunmen of Fatah al-Islam – who are still hiding in the smashed, smoking ruins on the edge of the Palestinian camp.