TYRE: Wrapped in bloodied bandages, Aline Saeed, seven, barely survived the Israeli strike on her home in south Lebanon last week. She was there to bury her father as hopes of a truce spread across the region, but a new strike killed her infant sister and other relatives.
The strike on the Saeed family home in the village of Srifa took place on Wednesday (Apr 8), the first day of a US-Iran ceasefire that many in Lebanon hoped would apply to their country, too. Instead, Israeli strikes killed more than 350 across Lebanon and left the Saeed family with four more relatives to bury.
“They said it was a ceasefire. Like all these people, we went up to the village. We went to the casket to read the prayers and walk home… suddenly we felt like a storm was landing right on us,” said Nasser Saeed, Aline’s 64-year-old grandfather, who also survived.
On Sunday, he joined other relatives in the southern port city of Tyre to pick up the bodies wrapped in green cloth. One of them, a fraction the size of the rest, contained his granddaughter Taleen, Aline’s sister.
She had not yet turned two.
With bandages to his head and right hand and scratches on his face, Saeed mourned in silence as the women around him turned their faces up to the sky and screamed in agony.
TALEEN ‘BORN IN WAR AND DIED IN WAR’
The latest war in Lebanon began on March 2, when Lebanese armed group Hezbollah fired on Israeli positions in support of its patron Iran.
Israel has since escalated its air and ground campaign in the country, where its operations have killed more than 2,000 people, including 165 children and nearly 250 women.
Wednesday was one of the deadliest days in Lebanon’s recent history.
“This isn’t humanity. This is a war crime,” Saeed told Reuters at the hospital where Aline’s mother, Ghinwa, was still being treated.
“Where are the human rights? If a child – a child! – is wounded in Israel, the whole world jumps up. Are we not people? Are we not humans? We’re like them!” he said.
Asked about the incident, the Israeli military said it was looking into the report of the Srifa strike.
Taleen was born in 2024, in the last round of fierce clashes between Hezbollah and Israel.
“She was born in the war and died in the war,” said Mohammed Nazzal, Ghinwa’s father.