Mohammed Sukayneh picked his way through slabs of rubble and twisted metal, clutching a few plastic bags – all he could recover from his home of 45 years.
It was brought down on top of him and his family last night by an Israeli airstrike, that killed at 18 people, four of them children, according to Lebanon’s Health Ministry.
The attack happened without warning in a place where people thought they would be safe – about 150 metres from the entrance to Lebanon’s largest public hospital, the Rafik Hariri hospital in southern Beirut.
Mohammed and his family were asleep in their beds.
“We didn’t recognise what is happening,” he said.
“After the strike we hear the sound like ‘boom, boom, boom, boom’ like this. And everything is thrown on us. Stones, metal, steel, fresh blood, fresh meat on us. You couldn’t speak, you couldn’t breathe, you couldn’t take your oxygen.”
He names five neighbours who are still under the rubble of their home. And there were others, killed in an instant, in their own neighbourhood – including two 19-year-old girls who were sitting outside his door.
Mohammed, 54, survived with a grazed arm, but his 20-year-old nephew is now in intensive care. “Half of his brain is crushed,” he said.
A civil defence worker at the scene told us six residential buildings had been brought down, most of them three or four stories high.
A veiled woman sat on the ground, with her hands on her head, rocking back and forth in distress. “There are no Hezbollah here,” she said, “we are all civilians”.
A neighbour said, “everyone flew through the air”.
Minutes later more remains were recovered from the rubble and carried away in a black body bag.
I asked Mohammed what he thought Israel could have been targeting, in this heavily populated area.
“They are hitting everything randomly,” he replied, his voice strengthened by anger.
“Without seeing there is children. Where are the guns here? Where are the rockets here? Blind, Israeli enemies. Blind.”