The surgeon had barely begun when a blast jolted the entire hospital lobby and sent everyone ducking and scattering.

A cloud of dust rolled across the car park toward the glass front doors and debris rained down on the vehicles outside.

When the cloud cleared, the upper storey and red-tiled roof of an apartment block about 100 yards away were revealed to have been left broken and sagging by an air strike.

“You see,” said the doctor, as staff urgently reassured themselves that their patients and colleagues were unhurt. “This is the case, this is what it is like,” he told The Telegraph.

Three chestnut horses, perhaps startled by the explosion, galloped loose down the street outside in the southern city of Tyre, the main city in the Hezbollah-controlled south of Lebanon.