For months, the staff at Rafik Hariri university hospital had been preparing for the worst. Nurses ran drills in parking garages, practising transferring patients from the wards to the bombproof concrete structures. A building was left empty on the hospital campus so that if mass bombing occurred, medics could bring their families with them and not worry about their safety.
On Friday night, the drills seemed to pay off. Dozens of bombs were dropped on Dahiya, the southern suburbs of Beirut, sending residents running to the safest place they could think of – the nearby hospital.
