Qana: The Place of Jesus’s 1st Miracle, Turns Bloody

30/07/2010 “We have lived through hell,” Qana resident, Fawzeya Atwi cried. “The people were chopped into pieces by the Israeli bombs. They bleed these people. You should have seen the heads.”
 

“Do you know what the dogs did at night after the killings? They were hungry and I saw them in the ruins eating fingers and pieces of our people,” Atwi said about the Qana massacre during the July 2006 Israeli War on Lebanon.

 

Head of the Red Cross in Tyre Sami Yazbak, who was helping to pull bodies from the ruins, told The Guardian that the first call about the bombing was received at 7 a.m., 6 hours after the bombing took place. He said that previous shelling on the road to Qana had delayed the arrival of Red Cross personnel.

 

Yazbak said that “many of the children who were sleeping inside were handicapped.”

 

Many journalists who arrived in Qana to cover the incident became rescuers, dugging through the rubble with the Red Cross in search for bodies.

 

Journalist Bahia El Ainain talks about her experiences during the 2006 Israeli massacre in Qana. “I cried several times. I couldn’t be a journalist over being a mother when I saw dead young girls. I couldn’t but think of my daughter.” She also recounts an incident when she was on a roof, along with all the foreign press and their cameras. Bahia pushed the cameras away; she admits that her patriotism outweighs the journalist’s instincts for objectivity.

 

WINE TURNS TO BLOOD

 

The southern Lebanese town of Qana is believed by some to be where Jesus performed his first miracle of turning water into wine at the wedding in Cana of Galilee mentioned in the Gospel of St John.

 

But in modern times it is blood, not wine, that is indelibly linked with the town. The blood of Lebanese civilians killed in Israeli bombing.

 

In 1996, one of the deadliest single events of the whole Arab-Israeli conflict took place there – the shelling of a UN base where hundreds of local people were sheltering.

More than 100 were killed and another 100 injured, cut down by Israeli anti-personnel shells that explode in the air sending a lethal shower of shrapnel to the ground.

 

Ten years later, the town is again in the headlines, this time because of a massive bomb dropped by an Israeli aircraft, causing a building to collapse on top of dozens of civilians – many of them children in their pajamas- taking cover in the basement. It was an attack by the Israel Air Force on a three-story building in the small community of al-Khuraybah near the South Lebanese village of Qana on July 30, 2006. 28 civilians were killed, of which 16 were children.

 

Israel is back in the Lebanese quagmire.

 

“Lebanese refugee women and children and men lay in heaps, their hands or arms or legs missing, beheaded or disemboweled. There were well over a hundred of them. A baby lay without a head. The Israeli shells had scythed through them as they lay in their building’s shelter, believing that they were safe.

A pile of corpses was burning. The roof had crashed in flames onto their bodies, cremating them in front of the world’s eyes. When I walked towards them, I slipped on a human hand…” an investigative journalist who was present that day describes what she saw.

 

The aerial attack killed members of the Shalhoub and Hashem families.

 

HEZBOLLAH SINKING LEBANON INTO CRISIS . More here>www.almanar.com.lb/NewsSite/NewsDetails.aspx?id=148433&language=en