JADAIDA (Syria): For three days after the Israeli jets struck, Samira kept her composure. But on Sunday, as she reached the safety of a frontier post inside Syria’s border with Lebanon, she finally broke down.
“I buried my son who was killed in an Israeli air raid,” the 42-year-old veiled mother said.
“Then I fled with my daughter for Syria without bringing anything with us.”
Hadi, her only son, was just 22. He was killed on Thursday but the family was unable to bury him until Saturday brought a respite from Israeli air attacks on their village of Taiba, north of Mais al-Jabal, in south Lebanon.
“As soon as Hadi’s body was buried and we read verses from the holy Quran over his grave, I pushed my daughter into my neighbour’s car and we set off, taking only what money we had in the house,” Samira adds.
“If it wasn’t for my daughter, I wouldn’t have left him,” she says of her son. “Amani is 18, and she’s all I have left. My husband died two years ago, and now Hadi...”
“Why? Why? What did we do to deserve this?” she cries, as her neighbour tells her gently to be quiet.
“Don’t make a scene. The Israelis must not rejoice in our misfortune,” he says, closing the door of his damaged car on Samira.
Around them at this post inside Syria’s border with Lebanon, 40 kilometres from Damascus, are thousands of others on board buses and cars.
One vehicle defiantly sports a portrait of Hezbollah leader Seyed Hassan Nasrallah, the target of Israeli attacks after his movement captured two of the Jewish state’s soldiers on July 12, sparking the current conflict.
His features gaunt, a handicapped man from Nabatiyeh crawls to get to the toilets. His brother Jaafar al-Zein explains that the wheelchair would not fit into their car.
“The Israeli raids went on for 10 days without respite,” adds 27-year-old Zein. “Every time they targeted one road we fled towards another. And when the raids eased, we left.”
Women carry babies in their arms, the elderly struggle with suitcases, and young people pull nervously on cigarettes.
“We’re doing 24-hour shifts here,” says Jadaida’s head customs officer Omar al-Issa. “We don’t have precise figures, but I believe border movements have risen by 1,000 per cent” since the Israeli offensive began on July 12.—AFP
