With a temporary halt in air strikes, both people and stories emerge from the destruction of one south Lebanese town.

BINT JBAIL, Lebanon - To walk through the heart of downtown Bint Jbail you must constantly keep your eyes on the ground. The streets are littered with chunks of concrete, twisted metal, broken glass and other remnants of a massive Israeli bombing campaign.

From the city center, for a kilometer in every direction, there is nearly total destruction, which makes the setting even more surprising as people begin to emerge from it.

They trickle out, just a few at a time — mostly people too old or too poor to escape, like so many others around southern Lebanon. They sit on slabs of broken concrete in the middle of their broken town, parched with thirst and bone-rattled to the core by an explosive fury many said they thought would never end.

The Hezbollah stronghold of Bint Jbail has been a main focus of Israel's military campaign in Lebanon, prompted July 12 when Hezbollah captured two Israeli soldiers in a cross-border raid and killed three others. Since then, Israeli air strikes have battered the town, which Israel says is a main launching point for Hezbollah rockets toward Israel. Bint Jbail also was the epicenter of a fierce ground fight between Israel and Hezbollah that ended when Israeli forces pulled out on Saturday.

But after an Israeli air strike against a house in the village of Qana Sunday killed as many as 50 civilians, the majority children, Israel said it would suspend its bombing campaign for 48 hours to investigate what went wrong.

The halt in the air strikes created a small window of opportunity in both directions: a chance for the Lebanese trapped by the fighting in the south to flee north, and a chance for journalists held on the periphery of the frontlines by the massive air campaign to finally investigate its consequences.

Driving south we see convoys of cars, most of them packed to overflowing, white sheets draped over their tops and white flags held outside their windows, in hopes there will be no mistaking their intentions.

Along the route there is evidence that the flags did not guarantee safe passage in earlier days, as vehicles with similar adornments are scattered about the roadside in various states of destruction.

Before we reach Bint Jbail, we stop briefly in the village of Tbnin, where there are dozens of people waiting by a gas station for taxis, called from places further north, to arrive and take them to Beirut.

Selma Bazzi, an English teacher from Bint Jbail, says she and her family walked three and a half hours to Tbnin when they heard the Israelis would stop the bombing for two days. It is a walk she says she will not soon forget.

"I saw dead people alongside the roads, burned people, people without heads. There was a corpse with only legs," she says. "It was horrible. I had to cover the eyes of my children because I didn't want them to see those things."

But the images along the walk were much less difficult than what the family endured during the continuous bombardment.

Four nights ago, when they had taken shelter in a neighbor's house, she says, a missile struck the roof, sending concrete toppling down onto her husband, Ali. It smashed his head and cut open a wide gash in his face, from the top of his lower lip to the bottom of his chin.

"I bandaged him the best that I could with a domestic medical kit," she says, "but we knew he needed more."

Ali would have to wait for days for proper medical care, huddled in the basement of a house with the rest of the family, until the opportunity came to leave. When they arrived in Tbnin this morning, he was treated at city hospital for his wounds, which included a half-dozen stitches to his face.

As his wife speaks to me, Ali leans against the base of a gas pump, adjusting his bandages and still looking very much in pain, despite being given some medication at the hospital.

Another man, a dentist named Dr. Ibrahim Sabbagh, also escaped with his family from Bint Jbail. He says the air strikes destroyed all that he knew of the city.

"Bint Jbail is no longer," he says in English, brushing his hands together. "Everything was broken — my house, my office, my cars. All of it is no more."

His fourteen-year-old daughter Lara says the nightly bombing campaigns began to take a big mental toll on her and the rest of the family. "We wished we were dead," she says, "so we could at least get a rest from these horrible crimes."

With my driver and translator, I head south. When we arrive in downtown Bint Jbail, it is clear the people we had spoken to in Tbnin were not exaggerating. The destruction is so complete it is reminiscent of the iconic images of Grozny,   Chechnya, after it was turned into a city of concrete skeletons following successive Russian campaigns to end separatist movements there.

Most of the buildings are partially or fully collapsed and pockmarked by explosive debris. Store facades are blown away, exposing interiors of chocolate shops, clothing retailers and jewelry stores, with portions of their merchandise seemingly intact, still on hangers or in display cases, and the rest scattered about with the shards of glass on the ground.

From this maze of the destruction, people begin to emerge. As they do, the incredible reality of their survival prompts me and other journalists, who must usually remain impartial bystanders even in tragic settings, to help escort and even carry those too weak to walk to waiting ambulances.

A journalist for Britain's Daily Telegraph picks up an old man named Mohammed, blind and seemingly as frail as a paint chip, and carries him over his shoulders, fireman-style, to the rescue teams below. He stops for a moment to take a rest, holds the old man in his lap like a child, pours a little water on his own hand and softly pats the back of Mohammed's neck to cool him down, all the while saying, "It's OK, Haj," a sign of respect for an older Muslim man.

Down another street, an elderly man named Ibrahim Bazzi is carried on a door that has been turned into a makeshift stretcher. His wife Amina has already been placed in the ambulance, her lifeless body covered with a Lebanese flag.

When the stretcher reaches the ambulance, he crawls into the seat next to the body of his dead wife. He says that they both were on heart medication for hypertension and that during the siege they ran out. She died two nights ago.

"She was starting to get cold," he says, "and I rubbed her hands a little until they were warm again. But then later in the night she died."

He remained in the house with her until the rescue services found them today.

From around the city, more people and more stories like this emerge: people who endured days of hardship and nights of terror, surviving on what they could find in their gardens or from their own dwindling pantries, drinking dirty water, living in fear and in some cases surrounded by the smell of death — bodies trapped in the wreckage.

Walking around the downtown center, it occurs to me that Bint Jbail has become like an ant farm, the backs or fronts of buildings ripped away, displaying their contents — a closet with a hanging pinstripe jacket, a kitchen piled with onions, a shelf of books — all exposed as if under glass.

A woman named Wafa Baydoun walks around the streets carrying two brooms. She says that she takes four different medications for her "head."

She says that she and her friend will stay in downtown Bint Jbail, despite the destruction. She wants to show us her house and begins walking down the street and into the distance before we can tell her we have to go.

We tell emergency workers about Wafa and in which direction she was headed. They understand well, as do we, that this small window could be the last chance for people to escape the area before a new cycle of destruction begins.