For Ahmed Khalil Ali, a 58-year-old Lebanese taxi driver, Israel has long cast a dark shadow over his life. In 1974 an Israeli attack killed two of his friends and crippled one of his arms. Now, an Israeli missile has left him without both legs.

Today, he lies in a Beirut hospital bed, a destroyed man refusing to talk to any visitor. His wife and five children, all also wounded in the air strike, share the room with him. His oldest daughter, Mira, 16, acts as family spokeswoman, employing her impeccable English from a wheelchair with bandages around a foot and her head.

 

"Dad's in a very bad way, because he feels guilty that he can no longer protect his family and doesn't know how he's going to look after us now," she explains. Ali had been on vacation with his family in his native village of Blida, near the Israeli border, when the current conflict raging in Lebanon erupted. It was there, 32 years ago, that he lost the use of his right arm. He had been sitting with two friends when an Israeli warplane dropped a bomb. Both the friends were killed and Ali suffered severe wounds to his right arm.

 

But Mira said the vacation this year was a happy moment -- before the sudden violence erupted and engulfed them. "The first few days were very calm and it was only one night we took fright because we heard far-off bombardments." As the night advanced, the bombings came closer and closer. Until finally one landed where they were. "It was like an earthquake. Suddenly everything went white and all I could hear was my mother yelling, calling out to all of us," Mira said.

"She pulled me from the rubble of the house, because my leg was broken, and it was only then we saw Dad without any legs asking us for help, to make a tourniquet to stop the bleeding."

 

Casting a look at her immobile father, she excuses herself, says she will see whether he wants to give his account of that terrible night. The answer, as always, is no. Since his 1974 injury, Ahmed had lived in southern Beirut, where Lebanese Shiites predominate and Hezbollah has its stronghold. Mira says the family is Shiite, but is not part of Hezbollah, and she holds the militia responsible for her family's tragedy along with Israel. "Why did they attack us? We're just civilians and we're the ones who are paying for this war with our lives, with our future," she says with bitterness.

 

All the family is now to be evacuated to Greece and then on to Australia where Ali is to undergo medical treatment and physical re-education. But Mira, despite the cruel fate bestowed on her and her father, does not want to go into exile. "I don't want to leave Lebanon," she says, her eyes watering and her voice trembling.