A big smile lights up Adam's face. In the photo on the phone screen, the child has his thumb raised. His father, Mohamed Sabra, a 40-year-old Lebanese businessman, looks at him affectionately. He holds back sobs. The 7-year-old boy is all he has left. His whole life now revolves around him.

Since the Israeli bombing in Nabi Ayla in the Beqaa valley on September 23 that killed most of his family, Sabra has seen his son only once, behind the glass of the sterile room in Beirut's LAU Medical Center-Rizk Hospital, where the child is being treated for skull and orbital fractures. He doesn't want the child to see him with both arms in plaster. One fracture in his left arm, two in his right and some ligaments severed. He talks to Adam every day on the phone. The boy thinks he's on a business trip to Dubai for his chocolate import company. He's promised to bring him back a present.

He doesn't know how to tell him that his mother, Dina Darwiche, and his 4-year-old brother, Jad, died in the bombing. So did his grandfather, his uncle and his aunt, as well as his other aunt from America, who had returned to the village for vacation. Six people killed, the day Israel began a campaign of massive strikes on Lebanon, one of which targeted the family's three-story building. It was 7:25 pm. The children were playing together. Sabra was watching television with his mother.

"In a matter of seconds, the building collapsed. I regained consciousness amid the rubble. I screamed, and my mother answered. After 10 minutes, people from the village arrived and pulled me out of the rubble. My phone was next to me, and I asked them to take it too. It's the only thing I've got left," said Sabra. The building, isolated in the middle of orchards, was the only one bombed in the village that day.

'Stigmatized because they are Shiites'

"This was the first time they bombed the area. None of my ancestors ever witnessed a bombardment here. It was so unexpected that Nabi Ayla was targeted, that we were targeted, that everyone in the village fled after that," continued Sabra. Surrounded by three Christian villages, Nabi Ayla ("Saint-Elie"), a Shiite village with a population of 800, with no stores or markets, no political or religious banners hanging in the streets, looks nothing like a Hezbollah stronghold.

During the previous war between the Shiite party and Israel in 2006, the inhabitants stayed in the village. They even took in 500 displaced people from the south of the country. "I'm torn between anger and a sense of injustice. We are innocent, we are civilians. We were never involved in any political or military activity," said Sabra.

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