Shadowy Hezbollah manages to resupply

QASMIYEH, Lebanon — There are no more bridges along the 90 miles of the Litani River, dividing besieged southern Lebanon and Hezbollah's fighters from the rest of the country. One by one, Israeli forces bombed them all. So a little ways from the Mediterranean Sea, where the river's meandering waters eddy, then empty, about 20 men heaved, pushed, pulled and coaxed — with appeals to God in between — two waterlogged trucks carrying supplies Wednesday to regions bearing the brunt of Israel's invasion.

Over a few hours, Hezbollah's shadowy organization emerged on the banks of the Litani. "Don't take pictures!" one of the men shouted.

The dozens of black bags, filled with tuna, sardines, rice, processed cheese, sugar and tea, were marked with stickers in red and green. "A Gift, the Red Crescent Society, the Islamic Republic of Iran," they read. Around them hurried men with walkie-talkies and cellphones, furtively glancing at sounds of war above.

They worked with precision — everyone had a job, hardly a movement was wasted.

And they worked with speed — no one knew when one of the distant sounds might signal an Israeli attack.

"It's dangerous," one young man said, nerves quickening his pace, as he lugged loads of bread, "but Hezbollah is strong."

In a methodical campaign to isolate southern Lebanon, where 10,000 Israeli soldiers are fighting a dogged foe, Israel has blockaded the city of Tyre, dozens of villages and the rock-strewn valleys that lace between them. The bridges are wrecked. So are the roads. And menacing Israeli leaflets sprinkled over Tyre have warned that any car in the street, whatever the type, at whatever hour, may be annihilated.

But along patches of the Litani, shrouded by wilting banana plantations and parched citrus groves, the provisions and casualties of battle passed Wednesday where there was no passing. Along with the supplies came the wounded fighters, ferried by the Red Cross across a fallen tree farther up the river, and along with the wounded came more bread, hand-carried over rushing waters where a bridge once stood.

Across the river were the rest of the provisions — dozens of sacks of flat Arabic bread in white plastic, 10 pieces in each, piled on a grassy spot.

"There are going to be planes in the air," the young boy carrying the bread said, skipping across what was left of the bridge.

He said he was delivering the bread to Abu Fadi, a Hezbollah member, in the nearby Palestinian refugee camp of Qasmiyeh.

As he talked, an older man approached the teenager, who was wearing black plastic sandals, blue shorts and a shirt that read, "Sports Evolution." "Don't say one more word!" he yelled at him.

In a monthlong war with Israel, still raging in villages along the border, Hezbollah has survived as a guerrilla army with support of the Shiite Muslim population in southern Lebanon, an organization honed by a nearly two-decade fight against the Israelis and devotion instilled by faith. It has survived, too, by a clandestine operation often unknown even to the villagers who live among them.

Rarely does someone acknowledge belonging to the "party," short for Hezbollah's name in Arabic, the Party of God. If they did, it would come in the mantras its activists often recite: The people are the resistance, the resistance is the people.