Lebanese Father Mourns Loss Of Family MARWAHEEN, Lebanon - Last month, Khamel Ali Abdallah kissed his wife and six children goodbye, then put them on a bus to his native village in south Lebanon for summer vacation. He was supposed to join them a week later, but war between Hezbollah and Israel broke out.
Top Picture: Lebanese Khamel Ali Abdallah, 36, holds his six-year-old daughter Lara in his lap in the village of Marwaheen, southern Lebanon, Friday, 25 August 2006. Lara was one of only four people to survive a July 15 Israeli attack on a convoy of Lebanese who were trying to flee fighting between Hezbollah guerrillas and Israel. Abdallah lost his wife and five of his children, all but Lara, in the attack. (AP/Todd Pitman)
Bottom Picture: Led by unidentified relatives, weeping Lebanese Lara Abdullah, 6, walks during the funeral procession Thursday, 24 August 2006 for the victims, killed July 15 by Israeli forces bombardment on their car convoy as they were trying to flee the southern border village of Marwaheen, Lebanon. Lara was the only survivor in her family, as according to the residents she lost several family members in the attack. (AP/Lefteris Pitarakis) ~ Click here or on image to enlarge
by Todd Pitman
Associated Press
Tuesday, 29 August 2006
He would see only one of them again.
The day after Abdallah's family arrived in Marwaheen, a small hilltop village a stone's throw from the Israeli border, Israel unleashed a barrage of artillery and airstrikes that reached Lebanon's glittering Mediterranean capital of Beirut and beyond.
The assault tore giant craters into roads across the country, making it too dangerous for Abdallah to leave Beirut. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of charred cars still line the roads of war-wrecked towns, more than two weeks after a U.N. cease-fire ended the fighting, provoked by Hezbollah's July 12 capture of two Israeli soldiers.
Abdallah, 36, who holds jobs as a security guard and a coffee server at a communications company, called his wife in Marwaheen three times a day for the first three days of the war.
"She kept telling me 'Beirut is dangerous, it's being bombed, be careful,'" Abdallah said. "I told her 'I'll be fine, take care of yourself.'"
On the fourth day of fighting, he called at 7:30 a.m. "She told me 'We are fine,'" Abdallah said, and he felt reassured.
He called back an hour later. This time there was no answer.
Abdallah managed to reach a brother in nearby Sidon on the phone, who told him he'd heard the family had fled Marwaheen after Israeli forces ordered residents via loudspeakers to evacuate within two hours.
The panicked family had rushed to the local U.N. headquarters and begged U.N. peacekeepers to protect them. The peacekeepers turned them away, and the group decided the only way out was to risk Lebanon's deadly roads.
"There was a fire burning inside me. I couldn't think. I could only worry," Abdallah said of the uncertain hours that followed.
Glued to the television in his Beirut apartment, he saw a report about a convoy carrying civilians trying to flee Marwaheen that had been hit by an Israeli airstrike. More than a dozen were said to be dead.
A sick feeling came over him.
Desperate for news, he called his brother in Sidon. His brother told him he had something important to tell him, but he could not do it on the phone.
Abdallah knew what it was and wept.
Twenty-three people in the two-vehicle convoy were killed in the assault, carried out by an Israeli gunboat and an attack helicopter that strafed the survivors.
Only four people survived. One was Abdallah's 6-year-old daughter, Lara, who miraculously crawled out of the burning wreckage without a scratch, but covered in blood and screaming.
Her aunt, Zeinab, said Lara was in her mother's lap when the vehicle was struck and her mother's body had shielded her. Zeinab survived only because she had stepped away from the vehicle, which had overheated or broken down, and was sitting by the road.
His wife and five other children - a 2-year-old daughter and sons aged 8, 12, 13 and 14 - were killed.
"God protected her, this little girl," Abdallah said, cradling her in his lap. "I thank God. She is all I have left."
Across south Lebanon, the yellow flags of Hezbollah fly over the rubble of destroyed houses. Hung across roads in Hezbollah strongholds, yellow banners proclaim "Victory with our Blood" in Arabic, French and English. The Islamic militia says it won an asymmetrical war simply by surviving.
But there are no Hezbollah banners in Marwaheen. Here black flags fly from rooftops.
"Nobody won this war," Abdallah said, wearing black trousers and a black shirt.
He leaned down, put his cheek to Lara's and ran his hand through her hair. She hopped down and ran giddily from room to room, too young to understand she'll never see her mother and five brothers again.
On a wind-swept hilltop cemetery overlooking a deep valley, the 23 slain were buried Thursday in coffins under a patch of dark red earth. Simple cinder blocks topped with pictures kept in place by loose stones mark their locations until proper grave stones can be brought in.
"The Lebanese people, the civilians, we are the losers," Abdallah said softly. "We have lost everything."
Dima Hilal - Two Poems ghaflah - the sin of forgetfulness by dima hilal born by the mediterranean Bedouin Eyes by Dima Hilal My hands turn to claws, tear
our mothers bathe us in orange-blossom water
olive trees and cedars
strain to give us shade
we come to america where they call our land
the East meaning different/dark/dirty
we soon forget
our grandmothers combed hair like ours
we wish our hair blonde our eyes and skin light
we know barbie
looks better than scheherezade
we think french makes us sophisticated so
we greet each other bonjour instead of salaam
proud of our colonizer's tongue
we forget the Qur'an sings in arabic
when we arrived
our fingernails pierced the palms of our hands
we stared at pictures of our children
eye sockets carved out by rubber bullets
on the 10 o'clock news
our brothers and sisters spit up blood and teeth
and CBS declared them "terrorists"
now we turn away from bruises and broken bones
body counts and funerals
we know we cannot help anyway
we forget we once stood on the same ground
they die on
we look for the arabia packaged by the west
we escape into clubs to watch
blonde belly dancers named jasmine
sashay almost naked
we eat pasty hummous at eight dollars a plate
and tell each other
how much we miss our home
------------------------------
newspapers declare war
the West erupts against
those backward Arabs
my throat bubbles, chokes with acid hate
rage and salt water form cesspools
in my Bedouin eyes and blind me
my breathing shallow
mind numb and calculated
the gardenia scent of my country
has never seemed farther away
I see your guns aimed
in the name of justice;
tearing flesh, stopping a breath
in mid-exhale, a heart
in the second half of its beat
when you scream terrorists
I hear the prayer of my family
a tight canopy against the falling sky
while you count mortalities, I see faces
that look like mine
now my lips will not form the words of Allah
as I feel our city shudder, then
break and collapse onto itself
my lungs save their wind for curses
as my people, bruised, cannot rise
and I welcome
the nausea which overtakes
weakens
forces my body to sink to the floor
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International Equestrian Federation President Princess Haya Bint Al-Hussein
of Jordan smiles as she gives a press conference at the opening ceremony
of the World Equestrian Games in Aachen, Germany, 20 August 2006. (AFP)
dances during a dress rehearsal of Don Quixote at the Royal Opera
House in London, 17 August 2006. (AFP/John D. McHugh)
A model showcases a creation
by Indian fashion designer Priya
Kataria Puri, 17 August 2006,
during a media preview for the
forthcoming India fashion week,
which will start 30 August, in
New Delhi. (Reuters/Adnan Abidi)
They made a desert and called it peace. Srifa - or what was once the village of Srifa - is a place of pancaked homes, blasted walls, rubble, starving cats and trapped corpses. But it is also a place of victory for the Hizbollah, whose fighters walked amid the destruction yesterday with the air of conquering heroes. So who is to blame for this desert? The Shia militia which provoked this war - or the Israeli air force and army which has laid waste to southern Lebanon and killed so many of its people?... ~ Robert Fisk: Desert Of Trapped Corpses Testifies To Israel's Failure