Israel to Halt Bombings for 48 Hours

The two families had moved into a basement of a half-built home because they hoped it would protect them from Israeli attack; but by sunrise, they were dead.

As many as 56 people were suffocated or crushed to death by an Israeli airstrike on the home in this southern Lebanese town. Many of them were children.

The few who survived sat in hospital cots with haunted eyes Sunday. They spoke of the long hours trapped beneath heavy heaps of rubble and recalled the dying groans of their loved ones that faded through the night to silence.

"When I woke up, I started screaming, and I kept screaming for two hours," Heyam Hasham said. Her fingernails were broken and caked with earth. She couldn't remember how they got that way. "I thought I'd die because everybody was dead around me."

Blinking dazedly in her hospital bed, Hasham described the last night in the house: The families tucked into a dinner of potatoes and onions at 4 p.m., then gathered around their portable radio by candlelight and listened to a speech by Hezbollah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah.

"When we heard him," Hasham said, "we were praying to stop the war."

Israel expressed "deep sorrow" for Sunday's attack but said Hezbollah rockets were being fired from the area. Government officials also pointed out that civilians had been warned to leave southern Lebanon.

"Liars! Liars!" cried Zeinab Ahmed Shalhoub from her hospital bed. "Every time there is a massacre they lie and make up an excuse."

Across the hospital room, her sister, Hala Ahmed Shalhoub, nodded silently. The woman's face was wan, her skin papery and eyes hollow. She gripped her bedsheet tight to her chin and told her story in the flat voice of a person shocked beyond emotion.

Bombs had rattled the valleys when she stretched out on a mattress with her two girls. She had to sleep, she decided, missiles or no missiles. As she drifted off, the 24-year-old mother rolled away from 18-month-old Rokaya and 3 1/2 -year-old Fatima. She felt their warm breath on her neck.

When the bomb crashed into the house, she thought it had hit a neighbor's place. Then she realized her mouth was full of dust, and she couldn't move under a heavy crush of rubble. Her daughters whimpered in her ear, but she couldn't reach back to touch them.