Lebanon: Israeli air strikes kill family, ten children
The Daily Star
DWEIR: Mohammad Akkash's voice cracks as he lists the names of his 10 grandchildren who were killed just hours earlier in an Israeli air raid on his eldest son's home. "The youngest one, Safat, was just six months old. Is a six-month-old baby a resistance fighter?" he asks. A paunchy man with grizzled crew cut, short white beard and weather-beaten face, Akkash stares bleakly at the ground as he sits outside his home in this village west of Nabatieh beneath a hastily erected awning to protect him and a dozen other male mourners from the noon sun.
Throughout the dusty hill villages and deep valleys of South Lebanon, similar displays of grief and anger were evident Thursday as the district reeled beneath the most intensive series of air strikes mounted by Israel since the Grapes of Wrath offensive in April 1996.
Sayyed Adil Akkash, a 41-year-old Shiite cleric allegedly connected to Hizbullah, was killed along with his wife and 10 children in a pre-dawn air raid in which up to four missiles struck his three-story home on a stony hillside outside Dweir. The missiles leveled the building completely, leaving a pile of rubble, twisted steel rods and coating a field of green tobacco plants in a thick layer of dark grey dust.
It took rescue workers two hours to extract the remains of 10 of the 12 victims. What was left of the other two corpses had yet to be recovered.
"The first one they brought in was just three years old. They brought her in pieces. First her head and then her arms," says a spokesman for the Sheikh Ragheb Harb Hospital in the nearby village of Toul, a Hizbullah-funded institution.
The hillside behind the flattened house was littered with torn books, mainly religious tracts, the pages of which rustled eerily in the hot wind.
"There's nothing that can justify something like this," says Hassan Ramal, who was knocked off his feet by the force of the early-morning air strike.
"Israel is acting the same way it is in Gaza. Why did they hit a house full of children? Is this how Ehud Olmert takes his revenge?" Read more
DWEIR: Mohammad Akkash's voice cracks as he lists the names of his 10 grandchildren who were killed just hours earlier in an Israeli air raid on his eldest son's home. "The youngest one, Safat, was just six months old. Is a six-month-old baby a resistance fighter?" he asks. A paunchy man with grizzled crew cut, short white beard and weather-beaten face, Akkash stares bleakly at the ground as he sits outside his home in this village west of Nabatieh beneath a hastily erected awning to protect him and a dozen other male mourners from the noon sun.
Throughout the dusty hill villages and deep valleys of South Lebanon, similar displays of grief and anger were evident Thursday as the district reeled beneath the most intensive series of air strikes mounted by Israel since the Grapes of Wrath offensive in April 1996.
Sayyed Adil Akkash, a 41-year-old Shiite cleric allegedly connected to Hizbullah, was killed along with his wife and 10 children in a pre-dawn air raid in which up to four missiles struck his three-story home on a stony hillside outside Dweir. The missiles leveled the building completely, leaving a pile of rubble, twisted steel rods and coating a field of green tobacco plants in a thick layer of dark grey dust.
It took rescue workers two hours to extract the remains of 10 of the 12 victims. What was left of the other two corpses had yet to be recovered.
"The first one they brought in was just three years old. They brought her in pieces. First her head and then her arms," says a spokesman for the Sheikh Ragheb Harb Hospital in the nearby village of Toul, a Hizbullah-funded institution.
The hillside behind the flattened house was littered with torn books, mainly religious tracts, the pages of which rustled eerily in the hot wind.
"There's nothing that can justify something like this," says Hassan Ramal, who was knocked off his feet by the force of the early-morning air strike.
"Israel is acting the same way it is in Gaza. Why did they hit a house full of children? Is this how Ehud Olmert takes his revenge?" Read more
posted by exoplanet at 1:52 AM
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