He is “the only survivor of his (small) family”. After an Israeli airstrike on September 29 in Sarafand, some 15 km south of the coastal town of Saida, which razed an apartment complex and left 15 people dead, a two-year-old boy was found alive by Israeli forces. relief. Ali Khalifa's parents, sister and two grandmothers all died.
“The rescuers had almost lost all hope of finding survivors under the rubble,” says Houssein Khalifa, the uncle of the boy’s father. But “Ali appeared among the debris in the bulldozer bucket when we all thought he was dead (…) He emerged from the rubble, barely breathing, after 2 p.m.” under the debris, he whispers.
The boy was rushed to Saida hospital. Plunged into an artificial coma after the amputation of his right hand, and placed on a respirator, he must undergo surgery in Beirut before fitting a prosthesis. “We are waiting for the operations to end before waking him up,” explains Houssein Khalifa.
“Psychological scars”
At Saida hospital, signs of the violence of the attack are visible everywhere. Other relatives are also struggling for survival after the Sarafand strike.
One of Hussein Khalifa's nieces, Zainab, 32, remained trapped under the rubble for two hours before being rescued and transferred to the nearest hospital. It was there that she learned that her parents, husband and three children, aged three to seven, had all been killed. The strike left her seriously injured, leaving her with only one eye.
Zainab “did not hear the sound of the missiles that fell on her family’s house,” says her uncle. “She saw only darkness and heard deafening screams.” Ali Alaa El-Din, the doctor in charge of her follow-up, explains that “Zainab’s psychological scars are much more important than her physical injuries”.
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He also treats Zainab's sister, Fatima, 30, injured in the same attack. Both suffered injuries “all over their bodies, with fractures to their feet and lung damage,” the doctor said. From a medical point of view, he continues, “the cases of Zainab and Fatima are not among the most difficult we faced during the war, but they are the most serious on a psychological and human level.”
Since September 23, the escalation of the conflict between the Israeli army and Lebanese Hezbollah has left more than 2,600 dead in Lebanon, according to figures from the Ministry of Health.
