Those fleeing the lethal Israeli air campaign careen out of the hills, bound for the Lebanese port town of Tyre and safer havens north.

Torn white sheets dangling from car antennas smack in the wind as the vehicles, weighed down with refugees and honking madly at dawdling traffic, navigate the scarred roads at dangerous speeds.

Hundreds of cars haven't made it out of these villages. Their charred remains and the smell of fresh cordite and ash leave little doubt as to their fate.

"Whoever drives the roads, takes a big risk. Maybe he won't return," says Mohammed Abbas, 37, who decided to stay in Tyre and play cards with his three kids rather than brave a road trip north.

The buzz of Israeli drones overhead is an unnerving feeling for motorists, who know that an Israeli soldier, somewhere, somehow, is always watching.

One can only pray that his car will be spared. Ali Jaafar Mdihly, 21, had no such luck -- twice.

"They hit me while I was fleeing on my motorcycle," Mdihly said, recovering in a hospital bed in Tyre. "People came along in a minibus and gave me a ride. A few minutes later, we got hit again."

There seems to be little rhyme or reason to the Israeli onslaught. Whole families have been smitten from above.

In addition to its merciless targeting of vehicles, Israel has set about cutting roads and bridges to sever supply routes for Hezbollah fighters. They destroyed the main roads connecting villages in south Lebanon early on in their air campaign, but resourceful residents here are well skilled at adapting to war.

Detours down village sidestreets and through citrus groves circumvent Olympic swimming pool-sized craters left by punishing road-busting bombs. Spraypainted walls and hand-painted signs direct evacuees along the ever-changing detour routes.

East of Tyre, the roads bear all the signs of the airborne mayhem that continues to pummel south Lebanon.

A pair of 200-class Mercedes, one blue, one white, have crashed head-on into trees, just 30 meters (yards) apart.

The first was hit by a missile, killing its three occupants instantly. The driver's rotting corpse remains. Emergency workers, who themselves have been targets of Israeli air strikes, feared that extracting the mangled body from the heap of twisted metal would take too long and leave them vulnerable to another attack.

The second Mercedes lost control, ran off the road, and killed four of its occupants. Only a 12-year-old girl survived.

As one travels east the scene repeats itself over and over. Drivers swerve to avoid upended cars, thrown onto their roofs by powerful Israeli bombs. Crumbling concrete and broken glass crackles beneath the tires of passing vehicles.

On the coastal road south of Tyre, a red pickup truck has plowed into an erosion wall and been left for scrap metal.

A sign warns: "No foreigners are allowed past this point without permission of the intelligence directorate."

But law and order has ceased to exist here.

SUVs and late-model Mercedes sit abandoned in the middle of the two-lane highway, seemingly unscathed. One can only wonder what prompted their drivers to ditch their swanky automobiles.

Perhaps the sight of pulverized gas stations, cratered banana plantations, and cozy sea-view homes reduced to rubble convinced the drivers to abandon their mission. Perhaps they simply decided that fleeing on foot was the safer option.

Mohammed Hassan Fuami, 75, is one of thousands of pedestrians who have similarly flooded south Lebanon's roads, walking for hours or even days to reach shelter.

The one-eyed farmer spent two straight days trudging through the heart of the Israeli air assault, fleeing his native village of Kounine.

On the long walk, "I was thinking about death," he said, as he arrived on the outskirts of Tyre. "They destroyed my house and killed my cows."

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