Four-Year-Old
Qana Survivor's
Night Between The Dead
By Hanady Salman
writing from Beirut
01 AUgust 2006
Electronic
Lebanon
Three of my colleagues went to
Tyre today.
I will spare you the details
of what they saw and wrote. There's only one thing that I need to share
with you. Saada went to Jabal Amel hospital where she found a four year
old boy, Hassan Chalhoub, who had spent the previous night in the morgue
between the dead. He had been sleeping next to his sister, six-year-old
Zeinab, in the shelter in Qana. There with him were his mom and his
dad, who's confined to a wheelchair. Many of the people of Qana are
survivors of the 1996 massacre, when 110 people were killed and more
than 100 were injured when by Israeli raids on civilians who had sought
shelter in a nearby UN base. Thus, many of the people of Qana have special
needs.
Hassan was sleeping when
it all happened Saturday night. His mom was injured, but she managed
to find her way under the rubble and was looking for her kids. She called
him, and he answered her. She asked him if he was injured and he said
no. So, she went to look for her daughter and husband. She found her
daughter's hand. She tried to take her out, to pull her up. She couldn't.
Then she saw her husband, so she crawled to him. But before that, she
caressed her daughter's hand and whispered to her, "forgive me
my angel because I can't help you out of here."
She saved her husband, thinking
that someone had already taken care of little Hassan.
She and her husband spent
the rest of the night in the closest house, where the civil defense
workers had taken them. The next morning, they took them to the hospital.
Hassan was thought dead.
They put him where they put the other kids. He woke up in the morning
and opened his eyes to see a two-year-old girl lying next to him. He
thought she sleeping. He looked around, and luckily found a man. "Ammo,
what am I doing here?" he asked. The man couldn't believe his eyes.
He took Hassan to his parents.
When Hassan saw his mom, he started yelling at her, "Why did you
leave me there alone, sleeping with our neighbor's kids? How could you?
You know, if I weren't scared I would have followed you home. But it
was dark and they were shelling, so I slept again. Where is Zeinab?"
His mother, Rabab, told him
the following: "She's having fun in heaven. There are no Israelis
there. She's happy there."
Hanady Salman is an editor at As-Safir newspaper