"Liars! Liars!" howled Zeineb Ahmed Shalhoub in her hospital bed. "Every time there is a massacre they lie and make up an excuse."
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.
Shalhoub doesn't know how much time dragged past as she lay face-down in the dirt, listening as death overtook her only children. "I heard my baby girl moaning in my ear," she said, holding one listless hand alongside her ear to show where the child had lain.
"They were all covered with the dust, and they died," Shalhoub said. "I couldn't scream."
It was her sister who finally saved her. The younger woman extricated herself from the broken house, hauled herself over to her sister and pulled her to safety. By that time, Shalhoub had convinced herself that her 18-month-old baby was still alive. The child was still warm; she was sure of it. "Get my baby," she urged her sister.
She was hallucinating. The tiny corpse was stone cold.
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