It is their feet that tell their story. They are bloody, swollen and bandaged after carrying them over mountains and under rocket barrages as Israel's war against Hizbullah erased the lives behind them.
In their villages lay ancestral houses crushed by bombs, family heirlooms abandoned mid-flight, the elderly and the frail, and of course the dead, their bodies trapped beneath the rubble. All that belonged to the past now.
The awful present was here in Tibnin General Hospital, a modest facility even in ordinary times, whose doors yesterday opened on a vision of hell: as many as 1,600 desperate and terrified refugees caught up in Lebanon's deepening humanitarian crisis.
They were men, women, children and newborn babies, forced to abandon their homes as the frontline drew nearer, and stranded in this hospital for days. There was no running water or electricity, no doctors or medicines, little food and less hope.
They had walked here over hills shuddering beneath Israeli air strikes. Some were barefoot. Others were shell-shocked. Some barely managed to enter this world; five babies have been born prematurely at the hospital since the beginning of the war, the Lebanese Red Cross said.
The hundreds here are the most wretched of this war: too poor or unwilling to flee when the first waves of refugees washed up from south Lebanon.
For Ali Hourani, a stonemason from Bent Jbail, his flight to Tibnin offered the cruellest of choices: his ageing parents or his five children. At 82, his father, who has diabetes, was in no condition to flee, nor was his mother, who is 75. "We spent 10 days under bombs, and it was as if we had died 100 deaths," he said. "No one cared about us. No one asked about us."
Yusuf Baydoun (78) spent 2½ hours walking here over the hills in socks and bath sandals. "They were bombing all the time," he said. "It was very bad. I thought my heart was going to stop."
Mr Baydoun managed to bring out his wife and two daughters. But he too left people behind. In the ruins of his home, hit by the Israeli forces on Monday night, lay the bodies of his two maids: one Ethiopian, one Sri Lankan. The women were asleep when Mr Baydoun's home was attacked. "It is very sad," he said. "It was not their war." - (Guardian service)