In shelter's ruins, a mother's search turns to horror

QANA, Lebanon -- Hala Ahmed Shalhoub said she heard her girls die as she lay face down in the dirt.

Just hours before, Shalhoub had lain down on a foam pad on the floor of the crowded basement shelter she shared with about 60 relatives, after eating potato and onion stew.

Rokaya, 1 1/2 years old, nestled against her mother's shoulder, and Fatima, nearly 4, slept beside them.

Then came the big blast.

``The dust came over us. I tried to move myself, but I couldn't move," Hala said from a hospital bed in Tyre.

She told her story quickly, in an uninterrupted stream of words, mouthed in a hoarse, raspy monotone.

``My face was buried in the dust. I heard my baby on my back making noises and also my older child," she said. ``They were all covered with the dust, and they died."

For more than two weeks, about 60 members of the Shalhoub and Hashem families had slept in the two-room basement on the edge of Qana, she said. They cooked on a gas stove in one corner and at bedtime scattered foam pads across the floor. They let the children out to play before twilight, when the Israelis rarely bombed.

Saturday night, the family went to sleep unconcerned, despite bombing that was heavier than usual. When the blast awoke them, Hala and her sister Zaynab both thought for a second that a bomb had hit another house. Only after a moment did they realize they were buried in dust and debris.

Zaynab, 22, dragged herself from the rubble and clawed her way toward her sister, guided by her cries.

``I couldn't see; I was just reaching for the sound," Zaynab said from the bed next to her sister's in the Jebel Amal hospital in Tyre.

When her sister finally yanked her from the rubble, Hala screamed for her to get the girls. Moments before, she said, she could hear her younger daughter murmuring.

``When I raised my head, I thought my children were alive," Hala said. ``My baby was still hot, I could feel her."

Zaynab picked up Rokaya from the pulverized house. She was unmarked, but dead.

``My children are going to heaven. They are going to join the Prophet," Hala said softly, her eyes blank, and her face bruised black. Blood seeped through a bandage and a fresh headscarf onto her pillow. ``Whoever did this massacre is going to hell."

The two sisters intoned the names of the family members who died yesterday morning after Israel bombed the house where they had sheltered since the second day of the conflict: their mother, Afaf Zabad, 45; their father Ahmed Shalhoub, 54; their sister Awla, 25; and their brothers Ali, 16, and Yusef, 7.

In the morning, grieving neighbors and survivors wept and shouted, screamed, and cursed as they began to tally the dead. But by late afternoon, they had turned wearily to tasks of recovering bodies from the wreckage, and, for those like Hala and Zaynab, the joyless job of re-creating a family amidst a kaleidoscope of memories of death.

All six survivors at Jebel Amal hospital heaped praise on Hezbollah, its leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, and the fighters doing battle against Israel.

But their anger and their politics couldn't mask their personal pain.

Hezbollah volunteers brought fresh clothes to the hospital for the sisters. Zaynab allowed them to wash her robe, but she would not let them touch her headscarf, which she kept wrapped close.

``I did not allow them to wash my veil because the blood of my relatives is on it," Zaynab said. ``I want to smell their blood."