[lit-ideas] Qana
- From: Omar Kusturica <omarkusto@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 31 Jul 2006 13:06:01 -0700 (PDT)
I was hoping that I wouldn't have to post on this at
length, however...
QANA, Lebanon ? Hour after gruesome hour, the bodies
came to light Sunday. Corpses with limbs snapped into
unnatural poses. Women with arms frozen upward, as if
they died grasping at the sky. Children with blue
faces, their mouths packed with dirt.
The two families had moved into a basement of a
half-built home because they hoped it would protect
them from Israeli attack; but by sunrise, they were
dead.
As many as 56 people were suffocated or crushed to
death by an Israeli airstrike on the home in this
southern Lebanese town. Many of them were children.
The few who survived sat in hospital cots with haunted
eyes Sunday. They spoke of the long hours trapped
beneath heavy heaps of rubble and recalled the dying
groans of their loved ones that faded through the
night to silence.
"When I woke up, I started screaming, and I kept
screaming for two hours," Heyam Hasham said. Her
fingernails were broken and caked with earth. She
couldn't remember how they got that way. "I thought
I'd die because everybody was dead around me."
Blinking dazedly in her hospital bed, Hasham described
the last night in the house: The families tucked into
a dinner of potatoes and onions at 4 p.m., then
gathered around their portable radio by candlelight
and listened to a speech by Hezbollah leader Sheik
Hassan Nasrallah.
"When we heard him," Hasham said, "we were praying to
stop the war."
Israel expressed "deep sorrow" for Sunday's attack but
said Hezbollah rockets were being fired from the area.
Government officials also pointed out that civilians
had been warned to leave southern Lebanon.
"Liars! Liars!" cried Zeinab Ahmed Shalhoub from her
hospital bed. "Every time there is a massacre they lie
and make up an excuse."
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-qana31jul31,1,6146899.story?coll=la-headlines-world
Tragedy visited Qana again Sunday, a once-picturesque
village of figs, grapevines and olive trees along
rolling, rocky hills where Lebanese believe Jesus
Christ turned water into wine for a wedding. It was
here on April 18, 1996, that 106 people were killed
when Israeli forces shelled a U.N. compound that had
given refuge to 800 Lebanese. The Lebanese government
said that at least 57 people were killed in an Israeli
attack on the same village Sunday, 37 of them
children, their bodies frozen in the angles that only
death can bring.
Most of the 27 people whose bodies were recovered had
suffocated, choking to death on dirt and debris as
their refuge became their cemetery.
"The people thought they were safe in a shelter,"
Bassam Muqdad, the head of a Lebanese Red Cross team,
said simply.
Israel said its attack on the three-story, concrete
and cinder-block building, perched atop a ridge along
a winding dirt road, came after rockets were fired
from the area. Villagers were blunt in their support
for Hezbollah but insisted that fighters were not
operating near their homes. They said the village had
been under Israeli surveillance for a week, their
movements in and out of the shelter clearly visible.
The village itself, they said, is under the control of
Amal, a Shiite Muslim group and sometime rival of
Hezbollah.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/30/AR2006073000594.html
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