ON the last day of her life Rayan Kudsi went to a friend’s shop in the southern Lebanese city of Tyre and bought two shirts for her new job at a nursery. The job was ideal: she could earn money and take her two young children to work.
In the early hours of the next morning, as Rayan, 30, slept near her daughters Alice, 6, and Celine, 3, an Israeli warplane dropped two one-ton bombs on their house in Hoshe, a village south of Tyre.
Rayan, her girls and her 78-year-old grandmother Um Zuheir were killed, probably when the first bomb struck the villa’s concrete roof just after 4.30am. The family’s tenants, a United Nations official from Ghana and his wife, also died.
All six bodies were still trapped under the concrete yesterday, despite the best efforts of Rayan’s cousin Zuheir Kudsi to recover them.
Kudsi, 41, heard on television that the village had been hit and drove for an hour from his house in Sidon to reach it.
So determined was he to bring his relatives safely home that he braved a road being bombed by Israeli planes — part of a ferocious air campaign that is inflicting mounting civilian casualties and attracting growing criticism.
The campaign appeared to be aimed at ridding the area of civilians so that full-scale air and ground operations could be launched against Hezbollah.
Hundreds of troops crossed the border into southern Lebanon yesterday, backed by artillery and tank fire, in the largest of a series of Israeli incursions intended to destroy the tunnels, hideouts and arms caches of the Islamic fundamentalist militia that has fired more than 1,100 rockets into northern Israel in the past two weeks.
Early today Israeli jets struck the southern port of Sidon for the first time, destroying the compound of the radical Shi’ite cleric Sheikh Afif Naboulsi.
But the cost of preparing the ground for the military was being borne by families like the Kudsis. I met Zuheir Kudsi at a hospital in Hoshe, 10 miles from the border, when he ran in, desperate for news of his relatives, and I followed his car to a scene of devastation nearby.
Kudsi ran up to the heap of concrete slabs and twisted steel that had been his cousin’s villa and searched frantically for a way inside as the alarm from a crushed BMW in the garage mingled with the sound of warplanes and drones circling overhead.
At the back of the villa, we found a doorway partially blocked by a wedge of concrete. Together, we crawled under it into what appeared to have been a reception room.
Everything — a table, a cabinet, family photographs — had disintegrated. Kudsi panicked. His face contorted by anguish, he darted from one corner to another, screaming his cousin’s name hysterically. Then he sprinted up a smashed staircase. “Rayan! Rayan!” he cried, over and over again.
I stood on the stairs, listening apprehensively to a warplane that seemed to be coming lower. Knowing that many targets are bombed for a second time, I realised we could be in grave danger.
“You’re not going to find them,” I said when he came back down. “We have to get out of here.” Kudsi just screamed.
We had been in the ruins for 15 minutes when sense prevailed and we wriggled back through our tunnel.
Neighbours said there was no hope — a medical team had come earlier on motorcycles and concluded that nothing could be done: everyone inside had perished.
Rayan’s husband, Ghayas Juma’a, who was in the small restaurant he runs at the time of the attack, was resigned to his loss yesterday. “All I want is for someone to help me get my babies’ bodies,” he said.
The flood of civilian injured and dead into hospitals in southern Lebanon reflected the misery inflicted by Israeli tactics during an offensive that was prompted by Hezbollah’s kidnapping of two soldiers on July 12 and which is intended to stop the group from launching rockets across the border.
Families hunkered down to ride out the firestorm of missiles and bombs. Some were so poor they could not afford transport out of the area; some were too afraid to travel on roads under daily bombardment; others stayed because they had lived through years of Israeli attacks and thought they could survive another.
Then, in village after village, a house would be flattened, killing the family inside, and the remaining inhabitants would flee.
At the hospital in Hoshe, four-year-old Samir Tormos curled up on a bed in his grey underpants, his face slashed by shards from a missile and his big brown eyes filled with fear. An intravenous drip snaked from one arm.
Samir’s brother, Imad, 7, had been killed in an airstrike on their home in the village of Talusa, southeast of Tyre, as they ate a meagre breakfast of bread dipped in milk.
Their mother Menal, 25, lay in the bed next to Samir’s. Her face, torso and legs were gouged by lumps of metal.
Samir’s grandfather Nabil, 53, sat nearby, still dressed in bloodstained green pyjamas, his feet muddy and bare. Nabil’s handicapped son Ali, 22, was downstairs in the hospital morgue.
“We never thought our village would be targeted,” Nabil said in the monotone of the shell-shocked. “We are farmers. There is no Hezbollah near us.”
Even when they fled, the people of southern Lebanon were in danger from F-16 warplanes that filled days and nights with a malevolent roar. It was impossible to know when they would attack, or where.
Zeinah al-Samra, 27, who had a badly cut neck, was one of two people being treated at the Jabal al-Amal hospital in Tyre after Israeli planes hit a convoy leaving the village of Sarifa, where bombs had flattened 15 homes.
“We were 10 people in a pick-up truck, we were trying to go to safety,” said al-Samra, a teacher. “The Israelis said we should leave. All my family were in the cars and now I am alone.”
On the floor above her in the intensive care unit, another woman from her pick-up, Alia Alaiddine, 40, lay motionless on a life support system with shrapnel embedded in her skull.
By Friday a meat refrigerator truck was overflowing with bodies and the mayor decided to bury them in a mass grave. Alaiddine’s was the second body out of the truck, her name sprayed-painted on a coffin bearing the number 2. She had died in the night.
Of 372 people killed in Lebanon since the airstrikes began, 336 are reported to have been civilians. In Israel, the toll is 34, including 15 civilians killed by rockets. Sixteen people were injured by an estimated 40 rockets fired into northern Israel yesterday.
Civilians were also caught up in fighting on the ground yesterday, despite repeated Israeli appeals for them to leave.
A Lebanese woman was taken to hospital in Israel after being badly wounded during a clash between Israeli soldiers and Hezbollah in the border village of Maroun al-Ras.
The Israelis seized control of the village after a group of tanks, bulldozers and personnel carriers knocked down a border fence and raced past a UN outpost. A bomb was dropped on one Hezbollah position and others were bombarded by Israeli gunboats off the coast.
Two brigades of infantry and the elite 7th Merkava Tank Brigade — about 3,000 soldiers in all — were preparing for a possible incursion deeper into Lebanon today.
“Our aim is to kill the Hezbollah, blow up what remains of their 20-25 outposts along the border and find and destroy their hidden bunkers and underground camps,” said one officer. The source said the soldiers would “go in, operate quickly and return to their bases in Israel”.
Israeli terms for a ceasefire were being drawn up in preparation for the expected visit tomorrow of Condoleezza Rice, the US secretary of state.
Additional reporting: Uzi Mahnaimi, Tel Aviv
