Wrapped in bloodied bandages, Aline Saeed, seven, barely survived the Israeli strike on her home in south Lebanon last week. She was there to bury her father as hopes of a truce spread across the region, but a new strike killed her infant sister and other relatives.
The strike on the Saeed family home in the village of Srifa took place on Wednesday, the first day of a US-Iran ceasefire that many in Lebanon hoped would apply to their country, too. Instead, Israeli strikes killed more than 350 across Lebanon and left the Saeed family with four more relatives to bury.
“They said it was a ceasefire. Like all these people, we went up to the village. We went to the casket to read the prayers and walk home… suddenly we felt ?like a storm was landing right on us,” said Nasser Saeed, Aline’s 64-year-old grandfather, who also survived.
On Sunday, he joined other relatives in the southern port city of Tyre to pick up the bodies wrapped in green cloth. One of them, a fraction the size of the rest, contained his granddaughter Taleen, Aline’s sister.
She had not yet turned two.
With bandages to his head and right hand and scratches on his face, Saeed mourned in silence as the women around him turned their faces up to the sky and screamed in agony.
The Israeli military said that it did not have enough details to look into the incident, adding that it takes measures to reduce harm to civilians in its strikes against Hezbollah.
The latest war in Lebanon began on March 2, when Lebanese armed group Hezbollah fired onto Israeli positions in support of its patron Iran.
Israel has since escalated its air and ground campaign in the ?country where its operations have killed more than 2,000 people, including 165 children and nearly 250 women. Pope Leo on Sunday said how close he felt to the “beloved Lebanese people” and called for a ceasefire.
In his weekly address to the faithful in St. Peter’s Square the pope said there was “a moral obligation to protect the civilian population from the horrific effects of war.”
Wednesday was one of the deadliest days in Lebanon’s recent history.
“This isn’t humanity. This is a war crime,” Saeed told Reuters at the hospital where Aline’s ?mother, Ghinwa, was still being treated.
“Where are the human rights? If a child – a child! – is wounded in Israel, the whole world jumps up. Are we not people? Are we not humans? We’re like them!” he said.
Taleen was born in 2024, in the last round of fierce clashes between Hezbollah and Israel.
“She was born in the war and died ?in the war,” said Mohammed Nazzal, Ghinwa’s father. Iran wants a ceasefire for Lebanon as part of talks with the United States, which concluded on Sunday without a breakthrough. But Israel wants to pursue talks with Lebanese officials through a separate track.
Heavy bombardment on Lebanon has continued, with nearly 100 people killed on ?Saturday.
Dr Abbas Attiyeh, head of emergency operations at Tyre’s Jabal Amel hospital, said last week’s bombardment was one of the heaviest in recent years and many of the patients arriving at his hospital were children.
“The challenges we’re facing now are the numbers of wounded that come at the same time, within the same 30 minutes or hour,” Attiyeh told Reuters.