On Sunday, next to the gutted and destroyed house in Qana, seven bodies lay covered with bedsheets, a blanket and a prayer mat. One small arm stretched out from under the sheets; thin, the arm of a little girl, a piece of cloth like a bracelet wrapped around the wrist. As bodies were loaded on the stretcher, I saw another dead girl; she was dressed in a black shirt with a coloured scarf wrapped loosely around her head. Her face was swollen.
In some ways I was relieved. The rumour we had heard in the hotel in Tyre was that at least 40 people had been in the house in Qana when it was bombed by Israeli planes, and here I was an hour later, with Red Cross workers and others running up and down, and all I could see was the bodies of two girls and five adults.
It’s weird, the things that make you feel better in the south of Lebanon, but seven dead instead of 40 gave me a sense of relief. But as I stood there registering that emotion, hellish scenes were unfolding. Four medics carried a little boy by on a stretcher: he was perhaps 12 years old. His arms were stretched behind his head, but apart from the bruises on his face and the swollen lips, he looked OK. For half a second I told myself that he was just sleeping, and he would be fine. But he was dead.
Then came two more boys in the arms of the rescuers. One of them, about eight years old, had his arms close to his chest, his nose and mouth covered with blood. The elder, about 10, had dirt and debris in his mouth. Their slight bodies were put on a blanket, the head of the younger boy left resting on the shoulder of the elder, then four men carried the blanket off. The bodies were piled with other corpses in the back of an ambulance. Two more small dead boys followed them. The medics were running out of stretchers, so they piled the corpses of the boys on one. Both had the same exploding lips, covered with blood and dirt.
Then another child was pulled from under the rubble, and another followed, and then another. You go a little crazy when you see little body after little body coming up out of the ground. I looked around me and all I could see in the house was the detritus of their short lives – big plastic bags filled with clothes, plastic toys and a baby carriage.
By three in the afternoon, when the corpse of a one-year-old boy was pulled from the rubble, he looked more like a mud statue than a child. The medics held him high above their heads, clear of the rubble. The faces of the rescue workers said everything that needed to be said.
What is obvious to everyone covering this conflict is that children are bearing the brunt of it. The few official figures collated so far seem to support this. Unicef says that 37 of the 60 dead in Qana on Sunday were children, and everywhere you go, it seems that it is the children who are being killed, injured and displaced. On Tuesday the Lebanese government said that of the 828 of its civilians killed in the conflict so far, about 35% have been children — that’s about 290.
Unicef also estimates that about a third of the dead have been children, although it bases that figure on the fact that an estimated 30% of Lebanon’s population are children, rather than any actual count of the dead. There are no official figures yet for the number of wounded children, but they will certainly exceed the number killed; as for those displaced, Unicef says that 45% of the estimated 900 000 Lebanese to have fled their homes are children.
Aid agencies believe that the reason children are suffering so much in this conflict is because of the big families that are traditional in south Lebanon. It is not just a matter of many children huddled together, of course: with numbers come all sorts of problems. If an air raid is coming, and you are running, how many children can you pick up and carry with you? How many do you have to leave behind?
Children often suffer most in wars like this – wars in which civilians suffer heavy casualties. They are weaker, they may be too small to run or walk. And as Amelia Bookstein, head of humanitarian policy at Save the Children, points out: ”Children who are wounded, separated from their families, or traumatised, may be too frightened or unable to flee their homes.”
There are the official statistics, and then there are the children, who seem to be everywhere in the heart of this conflict, all with their own, painful, awful stories.
A week ago I met Abbas Sha’ito, a chubby 12-year-old boy who was sitting on the side of a road south of Tyre, blood covering his face, his T-shirt torn by the bomb that had hit the minivan he had been in. He and 17 others had been inside; his mother, brother and aunt were all injured. Inside the minivan remained the headless corpse of his uncle, and the bodies of his grandmother and another man who had been fleeing with them.
Abbas was weeping, and had an arm round his mother, who seemed to be fading fast: she was injured in the chest and head, and one of her arms was almost severed at the bicep. ”Don’t leave me, mother,” the boy wept. It was clear that his mother believed herself to be close to death. ”Take care of your brothers and sisters,” she said to Abbas. ”Don’t leave me,” Abbas kept saying. Her head began drooping, Abbas screamed, and a medic rushed in: ”Don’t cry, she will be OK. Just keep talking to her,” the medic said.
As it is, Abbas’s mother is still alive, although still in intensive care, but Abbas was not to know this then. He buried his face in his hands and wept.
Last Wednesday, in a hospital in Tyre, I met Samah Shihab, a seven-year-old girl from the village of Mlooka near Tyre. She was in the yard of her house with her two brothers, aged four and nine, and her 14-year-old sister, when a shell fell. ”I was playing with my sister and brothers when the rocket came,” said Samah. ”There was pressure in my ears and my hands and legs were all in blood … My brother was screaming and I was scared.” According to her doctors, Samah, who was badly burned, is unlikely to walk again.
In another hospital in Tyre, which has seen 120 injured and 35 dead so far, I meet the son of the head of the hospital. Muhammad Najem (11) spends his days inside where it’s safe, because a week ago a car was hit by a missile on the road outside the hospital. Muhammad draws on a computer: his latest drawing is of a Hezbollah fighter. Next to the fighter is a star of David stabbed with a dagger — blood drips down into a vat full of blood marked ”Hell”.
His elder brother, Ali Najem, a fourth-year medical student, is rueful. ”The Israelis are planting very bad hatred in the children against Israel,” he says. Ali has spent the past three weeks documenting the stories of the children who have passed injured or with their injured families through the hospital. He particularly remembers one boy, aged about seven, who was caught in a convoy that was hit in the first days of the bombing. This boy described to him, quite calmly, ”as if it were a cartoon”, how a baby from the car in front of them was ejected out of the window when the vehicle was hit. The boy’s father had been killed at the scene.
Ali also talks about the impact on women delivering babies in the midst of conflict. In the first week of the war one named her new son Intisar, which means victory. In the past week, two new names have been given to newborns at this hospital: ”Wahid, which means ‘the lonely’, and Dayaa, which means ‘the lost’.” The woman who gave birth to Dayaa did so alone, having been separated from her husband in the Bekaa Valley.
Ali says she became disturbed, and called out to her husband: ”If you don’t come and take me out of this place, I will put myself under these bombs and kill myself and the baby.” For newborns, as well as for the older children, the scars of this war are going to take a long time to fade. — Â