The children

I just read this amazing article in the Guardian: "You go a bit crazy when you see little body after little body coming up out of the ground". I had huge tears falling off my chin before I'd even finished. War is always a tragedy and the impact on everyone is terrible, but the impact on these children just broke my heart.


He describes watching scores of bodies being pulled from the rubble of houses, all of them children.

Four medics carried a little boy by on an orange stretcher: he was perhaps 12 years old, dressed in black shorts and a white T-shirt with a coloured motorcycle on it. His arms were stretched behind his head, but apart from the bruises on his face and the swollen lips, he looked OK. For half a second I told myself, as I tell myself every time I see death, that he was just sleeping, and that he would be fine. But he was dead.

[...]

Two more small dead boys followed them. The medics were running out of stretchers, so they piled the corpses of the boys on one orange stretcher. One of the kids was slightly chubby; he was wearing a red T-shirt and shorts. His head rested on the lap of the younger, who was about six years old; both had the same exploding lips, covered with blood and dirt. It was obvious to everyone that these boys were not sleeping.

He then goes on to describe his encounters with children who are still living, but enduring the horrors of war.

A week ago I met Abbas Sha'ito, a chubby 12-year-old boy in a bright orange T-shirt who was sitting on the side of a road south of Tyre, blood covering his face, his T-shirt torn by the bomb that had hit the minivan he had been in. He and 17 others had been inside; his mother, brother and aunt were all injured, moaning and in agony a few feet away. Inside the minivan remained the headless corpse of his uncle, and the bodies of his grandmother and another man who had been fleeing with them.

Abbas was weeping, and had an arm round his mother, who seemed to be fading fast: she was injured in the chest and head, and one of her arms was almost severed at the bicep. "Don't leave me, mother," the boy wept. "Don't go, don't go."

It was clear that his mother believed herself to be close to death. "Take care of your brothers and sisters," she said to Abbas.

"Don't leave me," Abbas kept saying.

What kind of memories will be left with these children? What will their attitudes be towards their neighbours in Israel? How will they feel about the international community who has done nothing to protect them or their families?

Can you imagine if they were your children? How would you be feeling right now about all this talk of waiting until a permanent solution is found before considering a cease-fire?

I'd be thinking that the permanent solution can wait until people stop dying; until our homes and families stop being destroyed. I'd be thinking that all this talking of waiting was completely devoid of humanity and compassion. I'd be thinking that there is no justice in this world and that only those countries with nuclear weapons get to defend their citizens.

For the record, their are also people in Israel who think that this whole situation was mismanaged - that the chosen strategy has backfired, and that a better solution could have been reached by avoiding the missiles in the first place. I am sure that there are also plenty of Lebanese who do not support the tactics used by Hizbullah too, but I'd wager a guess that they are dwindling in numbers as their country gets destroyed and humiliated.

Photo from the Guardian