A charity worker has spoken of his lucky escape and the nightmare for Lebanon's local people as bombs fell on the strife-torn country.

Teacher Nick Dobson, of Snaygill, Skipton, was evacuated days after he arrived in the country to work with refugees.

Israeli bombs hit a refugee camp he and his companions had left the day before.

"We could hear shells exploding in the distance and knew that we were lucky not to be under them and luckier to have the chance to get out," he said.

Mr Dobson, a former pupil of Ermysted's Grammar School, Skipton, arrived in Beirut with Unipal (the Universities Trust for Educational Exchange with the Palestinians).

The Unipal project was cancelled last Saturday and the group left Byblos ahead of the main evacuation on Sunday.

The Israelis agreed a brief period of safe passage so the group could leave via the northern border with Syria.

Mr Dobson had been due to travel to a refugee camp at Nahr El-Bared in the north of country last Thursday, but the visit was put on hold after the bombing started.

"We moved up to Byblos, 40 minutes north of Beirut, and as we left, targets were hit in south Beirut right outside a refugee camp we had visited the previous day," he said.

"We'd been welcomed by kids beaming with smiles, keen to chat about Beckham and show off their football skills, and by warm, effusive greetings from shop- keepers. The next day, they were under bombs.

"Even as the situation worsened, with bombs falling on nearby Amchit and Jounieh to the south, we weren't really concerned for our own safety but more about the people we were supposed to be working with."

He criticised fellow Britons who had talked to TV crews about the bombing as some kind of life-changing experience for themselves.

"Civilians were dying in the hundreds and that was the only thing that mattered," Mr Dobson said.

"Although there were clear signs of support for Hezbollah, many of the people we spoke to hated them with a passion, and not just because of their role in the renewed outbreak of violence.

"It seemed to us insane and unjust to inflict collective punishment and such wholesale slaughter on a country that has only recently escaped 15 years of a bloody civil war and is struggling to establish an effective central government and national unity."

Mr Dobson will start work as a special needs teaching assistant from September but hopes to re-new his charity work in Lebanon next year.

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