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Horrors of war traumatise Lebanon's children

The Times of India

July 28, 2006

ABEY (Lebanon): For three days, Ali Ballout has been sitting on a bench in the school courtyard in the mountainous village of Abey. He prefers not to speak and refuses to eat.

The 16-year-old boy left his hometown village of Srifa in southern Lebanon and took refuge in Abey's school, 30 km southeast of Beirut.

His tall body and the soft bristles on his teenaged face almost seem to belie his pale, deeply sad and exhausted expression. Social workers at the school say they fear he's on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

As a group of journalists approached him, he looked at them with his troublingly blood-shot eyes and said: "You journalists, write down that dogs are eating the corpses of an entire family in Srifa after their house was bombed by the Israelis.

"My family is still buried under the rubble of our house in Srifa, and stray dogs are having them for their daily meals because the Israelis will not allow ambulances or rescue workers to reach the village to evacuate the bodies," he says.

He lost his father and almost all his cousins in an Israeli raid that targeted his home village. "They are destroying our houses over our heads without mercy."

Sipping water (maybe the only thing he's consumed in three days, says one aid worker), Ali sighs and asks: "Why all this hatred?"

"Not all the people in southern Lebanon are Hezbollah but they are turning us into Hezbollah by their massacres," he says, echoing a similar warning by young boys who have survived the relentless bombardment of southern Lebanon and southern Beirut in the past two weeks.

Since the Shia Hezbollah guerilla group captured two Israeli soldiers in a cross-border operation July 12, Israel has launched thousands of air strikes that have killed more than 400 Lebanese, injured at least 1,000 and displaced 850,000 others, while much of the country's infrastructure has been destroyed.

"How do you expect us to accept any peace with Israel when they have now killed my family and threaten more destruction?" he asks.

A group of volunteers in the school said they fear for the young man's sanity. "He is deeply traumatised and is not eating," said Iffat Zeidan, one of the women providing medical care for the refugees in Abey. "If he stays like this, we have to admit him into a hospital."

Zeidan stressed that Ali is not the only one suffering from this war, but also smaller children who sought refuge in this relatively calm Druze village.

"These children are so afraid of the dark, they ask us to bring them candles to keep with them at night in case the electricity is cut," says Zeidan.

This war is "against little children, the elderly and innocent civilians, not against Hezbollah," she says, adding that she could retell countless stories she's heard since the refugees arrived.

"The majority of children are extremely traumatised. What do you expect when so many of them have seen their loved ones killed in front of their innocent eyes?"


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.:: The Times of India

.:: The Times of India
 
 

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