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Bombings in Lebanon, Israel Hit Close to Home
By Roger Sideman, Senitel
Lebanon
July 20, 2006
While media reports from the Middle East depict thousands of Americans temporarily "trapped" in Lebanon, in Santa Cruz, residents like Naim Farhat worry about family members with no plans and nowhere to go.
Farhat's sister, who lives 20 miles south of Beirut, hasn't been heard from since the week-old bombing campaign began there. Farhat had just postponed a trip to see his 78-year-old mother in Beirut when the bombing began. A friend told him that two apartments he owns in the city, investment properties sitting vacant, were broken into by refugees to take shelter.
Farhat, 48, a Seabright resident, is among a handful of locals with relatives in Lebanon and Israel who are on edge as violence escalates in the region.
Watching the damage on Lebanese television via satellite is especially difficult for Rita Abinajem, who moved to Santa Cruz in 1983 and co-owns the Falafel Hut restaurant near the Boardwalk.
The electricity comes and goes in her 75-year-old mother's Beirut apartment. Although her mother feels safer in the northern, mostly Christian section of the city, away from most targets, a bomb detonated Wednesday morning only a couple of miles away.
The noise from attacks is "all days, 24-hours, nonstop," she told her daughter.
She's upset because the city had been working hard to rebuild when civil war ceased more than 15 years ago.
"There's no safe place to be the way it's going," Abinajem said. "I've got a big family there including nine siblings and their children. I talk to them constantly and so far, everything's OK."
She's not the only local resident with elderly family members in the region.
Twenty-five miles south of the Lebanese border in the Israeli town of Afula, bombings keep Oded Porat's grandparents indoors.
Israeli-born Porat, a recent UC Santa Cruz graduate living in Santa Cruz, says his family is "stressed out about getting hit by rockets."
"My grandparents hear warning sirens but since they live on the sixth floor, they can't make it downstairs to the bomb shelter, so they go to the hallway where it's safer," he said.
Meanwhile, emergency sirens in Haifa are causing the same problem outside Rose Manashku's 16th floor apartment in a retirement community.
Her grandson, Eric Jarovitsy, a manager at Staff of Life, said the residents have given up on going into a bomb shelter because the apartment's small elevator is causing hourlong waits.
Santa Cruz attorney Michael Mehr's wife and two teenage daughters have been hiding in Haifa's underground shelters. They were at the end of a month-long trip visiting Ruth Mehr's mother and nine brothers and sisters.
"It was very scary for them, obviously," Mehr said Wednesday evening while his family sat on a plane heading home. "They decided they didn't want to stay in shelters and had the luxury of being able to go somewhere else like Jerusalem, which they did. For my two daughters who grew up in Santa Cruz, they went through it amazingly well, but were still in shock when I talked to them at the beginning. They left fast without saying goodbye to their grandmother. My 14-year-old wanted to stay."
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