Moms search for dead children

2006-07-30 11:01

Qana - Mothers embraced their dead children in shock on Sunday as rescue workers tackled the rubble and dust of buildings flattened by Israeli bombing raids on south Lebanon that killed at least 51 people.

Rescue workers using only their bare hands searched through piles of debris - all the Israeli raids left behind of the buildings - while distraught women joined in to retrieve the bodies and take them away.

Among the buildings hit in the two hours of raids on the southern village of Qana was a shelter where dozens had fled to escape Israeli bombardment of areas thought to be even more exposed.

"After the bombardment there was dust everywhere. We couldn't see anything. I succeeded in getting out and everything collapsed.

"I have several members of the family inside and I do not think there will be any other survivors," said a distraught Ibrahim Shalhoub, 26.

"The bombing was so intense that no-one could move. Rescue efforts could only start this morning," said the man, one of just five people believed to have survived the strike on the shelter.

The bodies of 22 children were among those recovered from under the rubble of dozens of buildings which collapsed after the bombardment, said Salam Daher, the civil defense chief in the region.

"I retrieved my son and my husband, Sheikh Mohamad, who were wounded. But when I came back to get my daughter who had stayed in the shelter, it was too late because the building had crumpled," cried a woman identified as Rahba.

Terrified mothers held up and then embraced the bodies of their dead children, still wearing the pyjamas they had gone to sleep in. The bodies were covered in dust.

In Israel, the military rejected responsibility for civilian deaths in Qana, saying the Shiite militant Hezbollah was to blame for using the village as a rocket-launching site.

"The Hezbollah used the village of Qana as a base to launch rockets and it bears responsibility that this area is a combat zone," army spokesman Jacob Dalal told AFP.

Qana was the site of an Israeli bombing of a United Nations base on April 18, 1996 that killed 105 people who had taken refuge there during Israel's "Grapes of Wrath" offensive - also aimed at wiping out Hezbollah.

Ten years later tragedy has returned to Qana.

"There was a first bombardment at 01:00 (22:00 GMT on Saturday)," said resident Ghazi Aaidibi. "A few people went out of the shelter and about 10 minutes later a second bombardment destroyed it. There were 63 people inside, from the Shalhub and Hashem families."

Rescue operations had to stop in the morning over fears that the final storey of the building was about to collapse.

And as the recovery efforts continued, Israeli jets continued to launch sporadic raids around the outskirts of Qana.

Sunday's blistering air assault on the village came as Israeli forces made a new ground incursion into Lebanon and were engaged in fierce battles with Hezbollah guerrillas in the southeastern border area, Lebanese police said.

Clashes were raging on the outskirts of the village of Taibe, a few kilometres o the west of Fatima gate, a sealed border crossing into Israel, they said.

A Hezbollah statement said its guerrillas were engaged in "fierce confrontations" with Israeli forces who had moved into the Taibe region.

Meanwhile Lebanon's main international border crossing was closed, a day after Israeli warplanes targeted the road to Syria, further increasing the country's isolation, an AFP correspondent at the scene said.

Heavy bombs had gouged out large craters on the road leading to the Syrian border at Masnaa in eastern Lebanon, he said.

- AFP