Day 28

I wonder how it feels to be trapped under a building; pieces of stone and metal piercing through my body and suffocating the blood in my veins and the air in my lungs: To be unable to move and still able to think; a spiritual freedom perhaps but not a physical one. I wonder how it is to die slowly in the dark, with the idea in mind that tomorrow I will become a statistic, that this building has reduced me to a number. Perhaps if I am lucky some newspaper or a TV channel will even make a report about my life and the tragedy of my death, or a profile of a victim with interviews with my loved ones and other touching moments. I wonder if I would care about justice, injustice, politics, terrorism, or the international community. I wonder whom I will be thinking of and whom I will forget.

The number of victims in the Shiyyeh bombing has reached a record of 56 killed and a similar number of wounded until now, many are still missing under the rubble. I wonder why this massacre did not make as much echo in the ears of the world as the massacre of Qana (part 2) even though the number of victims is more or less the same. Was it a problem of production, marketing or material? Was it a bad timing for releasing a massacre story? Or has it become commonplace to have ‘50 people killed in Israeli air strike on Beirut witnesses say’ – it is no longer a headline story it has retreated back to Middle East news or even World news.

Yesterday in Ghazyyeh, a village in the south not far from Saida the villagers were performing the common ritual of walking the dead to the graveyard. 15 people had died the day before in Israeli air raids, needless to say these were civilians trapped under their house. During the ceremony a twisted sense of humor perhaps or just a killing frenzy inspired the Israeli air force to bomb those who were burying their dead. Another 14 people died. It is some kind of special offer that gives you one more dead for every person to be buried.

A landscape or a portrait in Shiyyeh