It is Jad Deeb's job to run toward the screams.
Ever since Israel started carrying out airstrikes in southern Beirut in September as part of its intensified campaign to dismantle Hezbollah, the 31-year-old IT specialist turned paramedic has spent day after day racing toward bombed out buildings to help pull people from the rubble of their homes.
The wreckage from Israeli airstrikes is often so vast that rescues can take days, at which point few are ever found alive.
"We are used to the smell of death," says Deeb. "We are used to dismembered bodies, we are used to decapitated bodies. We've seen the unimaginable."
The work is dangerous. He and his team, all volunteers of the Lebanese Popular Relief Association — an organization of roughly 100 first responders who are mostly self-funded, with some modest help from donors, and no links, he says, to Hezbollah — have come across unexploded ordnance while digging through rubble and have had to abruptly stop rescues when Israel started airstrikes nearby without warning.
