A Refuge That Became a Place of Death

Photos
Deadly Attack in Qana
Israeli warplanes blasted a group of buildings in the southern Lebanese village of Qana, killing dozens of people, most of them women and children. The Israeli military said the airstrike was aimed at destroying Hezbollah rocket launchers nearby and that civilians were not being targeted.

"The child who choked to death, what was his sin?" asked Khalil Burji, a 54-year-old electrician watching the recovery, who counted two friends among the dead. "When you see something like this, what can you feel?"

Burji said the two extended families had sought shelter in the newly built house, judging it safer than their older, sometimes shoddily built homes. The ground floor was built against a hill, and the valley below seemed to provide a buffer. But the shelling that night was as intense as any the villagers had seen in the fighting. At 1 a.m., as the children tried to sleep and the adults brewed tea, the first bomb struck outside the shelter, where a fragment inscribed MK-84 remained the next day.

Ibrahim Shalhoub, a tobacco farmer, and his cousin, Mohammed, fled to the town square to seek help. By the time they returned, between five and 15 minutes later, a second bomb struck the shelter, burying those inside.

"I got dizzy, then I passed out, and I don't what happened next," said Najwa Zeinab, 35, who was pulled out of the rubble by Shalhoub, but lost her brother, Tayseer, her sister, Nabila, and her 6-year-old niece.

Screams and cries pierced the night, with shouts suffocated by the thunder of explosions. "Don't die! Don't die!" Zeinab Shalhoub remembered people yelling inside as they lay buried or pinned by rubble, choking on dirt and smoke. Others called for their fathers and their brothers. "Ali!" "Mohammed!" Mothers were trapped with their children, sometimes listening as they took their last breaths.

"I knew they were all going to die," Ibrahim Shalhoub said.

Shalhoub called the civil defense and the Lebanese Red Cross for help. But the roads were too dangerous. When Red Cross workers tried to make it at 6:30 a.m., they were forced to turn back three times because of Israeli shelling, Muqdad said.

"We tried, but the bombs were falling right in front of us," he said.

By afternoon, some of the 27 bodies were laid out on plastic along the cement floor of a courtyard at Tyre's government hospital. Mehdi Hashem was 7. Hussein Hashem was 12. Abbas Hashem was 1. Ali Shalhoub was a child, but no one knew his age. None of his family had survived. The children were wrapped in blankets, sheets or bedspreads, then sheathed in plastic. Each end was taped, and their names were written by hand with a black marker on another piece of tape strapped around their waists. They were loaded into a refrigerated truck, the cool interior of the temporary morgue creating a mist when its doors were opened.

"No one should have to see this," said Mohammed Tahmaz, a 28-year-old resident watching bodies being loaded.

At the hospital, people grappled with the decision to tell survivors their relatives had died.

"There are families that have no one left, not one child," said Zeinab Shalhoub, who lost her father, Ahmed; mother, Affaf; sister, Awla; brother, Ali; and another brother, Yusuf. "My sweetheart," she said after mentioning each of their names.

In the hospital's courtyard, Mohammed Shalhoub sat with lifeless eyes, his right hand broken. His wife, Khadija, and his mother, Hasna, were dead, as were his daughters Hawra and Zahra, ages 12 and 2. So were his sons, Ali, 10, Yahya, 9, and Assem, 7.

For long moments, he was quiet. Then he spoke, to no one in particular.

"I wish God would have left me just one child," he said softly.

He started crying, his body heaving. "Oh, God!" he yelled.