Two years on, tears still flow
‘I feel as though I can never smile. I’m always sad when I see it on TV’

Eight-year-old Ibrahim Bourji wants to play football for Ansar when he grows up. The bright-eyed and cheerful boy, who lost the toes on his right foot in the Qana massacre, refuses to let his disability thwart his ambition. “Ansar are the greatest,” he said. “I hope they win the World Cup one day.”

Ibrahim, and his sister Maryam, 14, and their cousins Zeinab, 13, and Zohra, 10, from Qana, were all orphaned in the massacre which ended the lives of 18 members of their extended family who were sheltering in the Fijian Unifil detachment’s conference room.

“When the shell landed Maryam flew out of her mother’s arms. I saw her flying through the air,” said Naila Ismail, the children’s aunt with whom they live.

Naila’s brother Hussein was killed in the attack and one of the most powerful television images of the massacre was a hysterical Naila grieving over Hussein’s dismembered corpse.

“The Israelis cut him in half with their shells,” she said.

Ibrahim and Maryam, who was badly burned when the conference room was engulfed in flames, were both sent to France for treatment. After spending three months in hospital, they stayed with a French family whom they had befriended.

“They used to treat us as one of the family,” said Maryam who received extensive plastic surgery and whose left arm is still badly scarred and unusable. " It was strange the first day we stayed with them but from the second day it was like I was at home " she said.

The French doctors insisted  she required further treatment for her arm but after six months of being away from her siblings and village, Maryam said she just wanted to go home.
Maryam did not want to talk about the massacre and refused to be photographed but her sister Zeinab clearly recalled the horrific events that afternoon two years ago.

“Our mother told us to go to sleep when the shell warning came through. She said everything would be okay, but I knew she was just trying to reassure us,” Zeinab said.

When the Zionist shells began slamming into the compound, Zeinab ran out of the conference room and headed for the main gate.

“There was shrapnel everywhere and people screaming and running, One shell landed in front of me but it didn’t explode. A Fijian soldier told us to stay away from the shell in case it blew up. I ran out of the camp and into a civilian house where I stayed until the shelling had stopped. I feel as though I can never smile. I’m always sad when I see it on the television.”

Today, Zeinab and her sisters and cousins will visit the cemetery outside the gates of the Fijian battalion headquarters to pay their respects.

“I will bless the graves and read from the Koran for my parents,”

Like many of the younger children who survived the carnage, Ibrahim remembers nothing and said that he rarely discusses the massacre with his friends.