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His smooth baby skin was mottled purple with bruising and
his reddish hair frosted by cement dust, but nine-month-old Abbas Mahmoud
Hashem wore a hauntingly peaceful _expression_ when rescue workers reached
him yesterday.
When they picked up his tiny body, still wearing green
shorts over a nappy and a teddy bear vest, and looked at his eyes - their
unblemished lids trimmed with fine, long lashes - it looked as if he might
still be asleep. His dummy was still tied to its blue plastic chain and
pinned to his singlet.
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The body of a child killed in an Israeli air raid: Israeli
politicians claimed only terrorists remained in the
area |
But Abbas will never wake up. Instead he takes his place in
local legend as the youngest victim of the bloodiest incident in Israel's
onslaught on southern Lebanon.
It cost the lives of as many as 57 civilians, almost all
members of Abbas's extended family, who had refused to leave their home in
the hamlet of Khuraybah, set on a hillside covered with olive trees, a
mile north of Qana.
Israeli politicians have claimed the only people left in
southern Lebanon are terrorists. But the group of 65 people who huddled
for safety in one of the larger buildings on Saturday night were mostly
children and pensioners.
They knew Israeli attacks had killed civilians as they fled
the area. The road out of Qana is strewn with rocket-damaged cars and even
the ghostly burnt outline of a motorbike, fused to the tarmac by a missile
strike.
Qana itself has been repeatedly bombed during Israel's
19-day campaign but the Hashems and their relatives by marriage, the
Shalhoubs, thought they had found sanctuary on the ground floor of a
solidly-built three-storey structure.
Overlooking a valley and built into a hillside, it seemed
to offer some protection.
The women put down a carpet of foam mattresses. It was a
warm night and the children stripped to their shorts and vests as they
settled down.
Far above them an Israeli warplane had settled on the
building as a terrorist target. Twice it illuminated the house with a
laser designator, and twice it bombed it with deadly precision.
"The first bomb hit at about 1.15 am and only about six or
eight people ran out of the house,'' said Khalil Bourji, a 54-year-old
neighbour.
"There was smoke everywhere but just as the smoke cleared a
second bomb landed. The people who did this, the Israelis, are
devils.''
Dawn revealed a scene of horror. The left half of the
building had been replaced with a crater lined with shattered masonry and
twisted reinforcement rods.
The right half had skewed drunkenly to one side, some of
its floors pancaked on top of each other and its walls buckled and broken.
The nearby olive grove was white with a thick layer of dust. Bodies and
body parts lay blasted among fragments of masonry. Almost nobody had
survived from the large crowd known to be still inside when the second
bomb struck.
When ambulance crews arrived from Tyre, bravely covering
roads on which they have been attacked in recent days, they began the
grimmest search and rescue task, but without any real chance of
rescue.
They found limbs sticking from a muddle of broken concrete
and mattresses soaked with blood attracting the busy attention of swarming
flies. For a few hours the more wreckage they moved the more bodies they
found.
In one section they found 12 small corpses, all children,
among them tiny Abbas.
Their bodies showed few cuts or scratches. It was as if
they had simply drowned in a wave of soil and cement dust that overwhelmed
them in an instant.
"The Israelis have planes, Hizbollah has no planes,''
shouted 31-year-old Kassam Abbas. "The Israelis can see everything. Surely
they can see that this house had nothing but children playing in front of
it?''
Traumatised survivors were able to draw up a list of 57
names of people they believed were in the building and were unaccounted
for.
In Tyre, at the general hospital which has already seen its
fair share of hellish scenes, a member of staff was forced to do a grim
name check as the bodies arrived by ambulance. One by one, he ticked off
the names on the list from the bodies delivered by ambulance. By
mid-afternoon 27 bodies had arrived. Abbas was number 25 but rescue
workers believe the building will eventually give up the remains of all
57.
After his name was ticked off, Abbas was bundled into a
shroud of plastic sheeting, tied off at each end with sticky tape on which
his name was scrawled.
He was then placed alongside the other victims in the back
of a refrigerated lorry normally used to carry meat for butchers that has
been pressed into service as a mortuary. | 
